Is network slicing toast?
Ericsson and pals are still desperately trying to present network slicing as the best thing since another famous sliced innovation that took breadknives out of the toast-making routine and is far easier for the average punter to digest. It’s a $200 billion sales opportunity for telcos, cooed executives from the Swedish equipment maker on a webinar this week, citing an ageing Arthur D. Little report that examined 400 “use cases” across 70 industries.
It is frequently marketed as one of the bonus features of 5G. But it’s increasingly hard to share Ericsson’s enthusiasm about network slicing as a world-changing event. From a sales angle, it seems likelier to end up in the neglected breadbin of telco technologies left to grow stale and mouldy.
Perhaps that’s overdoing the criticism. Network slicing services haven’t really arrived en masse, partly because slicing is easier to do with the standalone variant of 5G yet to spread across the planet. Ericsson provided a succinct description of it this week that even the most technologically inept could just about understand. On most of today’s networks, every application is treated in the same “best-efforts” manner; with slicing, a strip of the network could be ringfenced and tailored to meet individual needs. A games company, for instance, might demand a high-speed guarantee with none of the jitter that upsets bedroom warriors.
You can probably spot one marketing problem immediately. Network slicing isn’t a new service or application, merely a promise that old ones won’t fail or dip below established thresholds for bandwidth, latency, security, reliability etc. Dean Bubley, an outspoken analyst with Disruptive Wireless, put it succinctly in a recent LinkedIn post.
“At best, slicing is an internal toolset that might allow telco operations or product teams (or their vendors) to manage their network resources,” he wrote. “But the idea that slicing itself is a *product*, or that application developers or enterprises will ‘buy a slice’ is delusional.”
Hey, big spender, here’s your own spectrum
Not everyone would agree with this largely negative assessment, of course. Our generic games company might have a direct sales relationship with an operator thanks only to network slicing, and the guarantee that brings for its own customers. Norway’s Telenor, moreover, already claims to have sold slices to public-sector organizations. “Defense and emergency services asked for it,” said Terje Jensen, Telenor’s head of network architecture, during a conversation at the recent Digital Transformation World event in Copenhagen.
He concedes, however, that agencies had picked up on the industry chatter about network slicing and saw it as a means to an end. Hospitals in Scandinavia are also using Telenor-provided slices as a fail-safe crutch for connectivity, and they asked not for slicing but for certain requirements to be met. In this case, Bubley seems to be spot on.
The opportunity for slicing has probably shrunk since the concept was first aired, too. Ericsson alluded to the reason for that shrinkage on its webinar this week. Standalone private networks, it pointed out, don’t have the same performance issues as the wider public network, but they are expensive to set up and run. The answer for companies unwilling or unable to shoulder that investment burden is slicing, insisted Ericsson. Yet numerous big enterprise spenders on connectivity have decided they would rather build their own dedicated infrastructure.
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