James Pearce, TelecomTV:
I'm delighted to be joined today by Marcelo Malizia, who is going to be demonstrating Ericsson's efforts to help rethink monetisation with differentiated connectivity. Marcelo, over to you.

Marcelo Malizia, Ericsson:
Thank you very much. So what we are showing here — if we start thinking about moments, situations that we face every day, when normal people, consumers, enterprises, are willing to pay extra for a better outcome, for where performance really matters. Here we have examples of use cases, applications where there is a need for predictable performance, very stable, guaranteed connectivity. And in these moments, you are not looking at what the cost per gigabyte is. You're thinking about what outcome you need and how much you are willing to pay to get that done. So if you take an example here — a simple one — like this guy: he has the hottest food truck in town. He wakes up in the morning not thinking, "Oh, I want connectivity with 10 gigabytes or whatever to connect my payment terminals." He's just thinking that he wants to connect his payment terminal, he wants flawless transactions, he wants it to be fast so he doesn't get long queues, and he has time to focus on doing what he does best — his food.

So if you think about bringing this to the reality of operators and service providers, it's about understanding what the needs and goals are for this user and how you can translate that into a network configuration that will provide what he needs. And if you prove that you can deliver the experiences he is expecting, you can also be entitled to charge for that better outcome. In today's networks, it is difficult because everyone is sharing the same connectivity — best-effort mobile broadband. So if there is congestion, everyone is affected similarly. But when we move to 5G SA networks combined with different capabilities that we will see soon, it becomes possible to add more differentiation and ensure that you can deliver unique connectivity or different performance levels for different users.

So in this example, for this type of connectivity, you have some requirements such as specific uplink and downlink throughput, latency, and also what type of traffic you have in the network — what we call mission-critical latency. What is important here is that the packet size is small, but it needs to be delivered within a certain interval of time, so latency has to be prioritised. For service providers, the question is how you translate this into a connectivity offering that will prioritise those characteristics. For that, there is a toolkit of capabilities. There are several radio features and new radio schedulers that come with 5G SA and 5G SA Advanced. We have features like URSP or L4S — low latency, low loss. You can combine those depending on the needs. If you look at this specific use case, you do not need all of them. You need the ones that will prioritise the access of those terminals to the network, guarantee the minimum uplink and downlink, and deliver the latency required for this service.

You then package that into what we call performance levels. A performance level is essentially building a network slice. Within that network slice, which is instantiated in the network, you apply those features to provide those characteristics. Of course, this is about building the connectivity, but you also need to think about how you sell this to your customers and how you convey the value of the connectivity. The go-to-market proposition is different depending on the segment. If you are going into the enterprise market, it is all about assured productivity. Your proposition should be that you can provide what they need to run their operations smoothly. But when you go to the consumer market, it is more about experience. If a person is sitting in a football stadium and wants access to premium content, or an influencer is at a concert and wants to do live streaming for their followers, it is about having that connectivity that enables them to do what they need.

You can also look at how to work with the wholesale market and, instead of selling directly as a subscription, go via the application — embedding capabilities in the application with APIs that trigger the network to allocate a certain level of connectivity. So there are different models and different paths to monetise differentiated connectivity. You can also start to think about how to scale across different horizons. You can scale by location — if you have coverage in a stadium, you can have multiple use cases for which you sell connectivity to different players operating in that stadium — or you can have the same use case selling to multiple users, or you can look at different channels.

What is important for service providers is that they need to get out there and get started. You do not need to have all the pieces of the network ready from the beginning. You can start with some low-hanging fruit, take some simple use cases, explore them, learn how to use the technology, learn how to package that to sell the services. Then you can start monetising, and then you can scale that use case or expand with other use cases or other capabilities. This becomes a recurring loop. That is what we see our customers doing today. We have more than 65 commercial deployments of differentiated connectivity today, and all of them started with exploration and have been growing over time.

James Pearce, TelecomTV:
Sounds like a huge opportunity. Thank you for joining us today, Marcelo.

Marcelo Malizia, Ericsson:
You're welcome.