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for instance. However, other than the poten al of network slicing, "very few use cases have been developed and launched commercially," he said. In addi on, operators are already struggling to make a return from exis ng investments in non-standalone 5G (5G NSA). STL also highlighted changes at the public cloud providers themselves. For example, it noted that there are doubts about Microso 's commitment to telco cloud following the restructuring of its operator business, resul ng in the discon nua on of mobile core products including the former Affirmed and Metaswitch product sets. "I think that's causing some more hesitancies now, because AWS is ideally placed to capitalize on that and establish a leadership and dominance in terms of public cloud suppor ng network func ons, but operators obviously don't want to give AWS that dominance, and they might have to wait un l other players have scaled up and demonstrated the performance and resilience of their cloud infrastructure," Mar n said. He noted that Google Cloud and Oracle are two providers that could "step into the breach" here. Looking ahead to 5G Advanced, 6G Another reason for the hesitancy over 5G SA is that some operators may now be looking toward newer technologies such as 5G Advanced and 6G. Mar n said 5G Advanced (also called 5.5G) use cases generally do not need standalone, although he noted that RedCap technology is one excep on as it relies on the network slicing and massive machine type communica ons (or eMTC) capabili es of 5G SA. "So if RedCap is more broadly adopted, that could act as a catalyst," he said. Editor's Note: A er this ar cle published, Fierce heard from Sue Rudd, managing director of BBand Communica ons, who said 5G Advanced always requires 5G SA as a pre-requisite and "RedCap is NOT just 'one excep on.'" "All standard 3GPP 5G Advanced features leverage 5G service- based architecture," she said. Meanwhile, Mar n observed that many operators are now at the end of their 5G investment cycle, "and they'll be star ng to look towards 6G." While no ng Tier 1 operators that have rolled out 5G SA at scale "will now be looking to get a return on those investments" by developing network slicing use cases, Mar n said that the "long tail of operators that are just not there yet are probably now going to wait and see, and maybe just explore 5.5G and indefinitely defer standalone." Virtual approaches Meanwhile, the STL report suggests that the prospects for vRAN and open RAN, where vRAN is defined as Open RAN compliant but delivered generally by a single vendor, look more promising than those of 5G SA. Here, Mar n makes it clear that operators do not have to synchronize 5G SA and vRAN/open RAN investments, and that one does not necessarily predetermine the other. At the same me, he said that operators have been unsure about which of those investments to priori ze, ques oning whether or not they need 5G SA to "really leverage in full the benefits of open RAN, par cularly in the programmability of the RAN around network slicing and spectrum management. So I think that has been another complica ng factor as well." "I think operators have been si ng on these ques ons for the last two or three years, not just SA, but what do we do about public cloud? And do we go for a fully mul -cloud model? It all hangs together, you can't really take one in isola on from the bigger picture," he added. The STL report notes that significant open/vRAN projects from major operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and STC are set to go live commercially to some extent in 2024. The vRAN model "has the poten al to establish itself as the successful model for 5G open RAN," Mar n added. "A lot of factors s ll have to come together, in terms of performance, cost, energy efficiency, and the ability to demonstrate that it's deployed in an open way. But I think the poten al is very much there for vRAN," he said. Ar cle Credit: h ps://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/window- closing-standalone-5g Talleycom.com SHEET QUARTER 3 2024

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