Frost & Sullivan: APAC 5G revenues to grow sevenfold by 2024
Enterprise 5G revenues could grow to seven times their 2019 level in the Asia-Pacific region by 2024, according to analysts from Frost & Sullivan.
The forecast is included in the firm’s Mega Trends in Asia-Pacific to Drive the 5G Enterprise Market, 2019-2024 report.
Analysts suggest the growth will occur in government, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications verticals, with new challenges pushing enterprises to transform and create new use cases to optimise efficiency.
The Covid effect
The transformation will be accelerated by Covid-19, with the pandemic driving the need for stable and reliable data transmission, and supporting ongoing remote working patterns.
Frost & Sullivan puts 5G at the heart of enterprise transformation and outlines four key areas for growth:
- Implementing automation to enable an open application programming interface (API), allowing flexibility, manageability, and cost savings.
- Utilising edge computing to address the need to handle rising IoT-enabled use cases due to the increasing number of connected devices in the network.
- Offering network slicing solutions to meet the demand for more bandwidth offered with SLAs.
- Using artificial intelligence to help cognitive engagement to better connect with customers and anticipate their needs and potential problems.
5G network slicing
Sofea Zukarnain, information and communication technologies research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said, "5G enterprises in Asia-Pacific are undergoing digital transformation at a more rapid pace to either optimise or enable business processes to keep up with the changing consumer demand.
"However, these digital transformation initiatives will add pressure on existing networks, as new solutions will require higher bandwidth and availability to offer the necessary reliability, driving the need for enterprises to transform their network infrastructure. This will boost the demand for 5G enterprise solutions and new enabling technologies such as network slicing and edge computing.
"Network slicing will empower enterprises with end-to-end ownership of a slice of the 5G network that can be used for a specific use case. Further, there are many benefits to utilizing a slice of 5G, including the ability to provide enterprises with better control, management capability, and agility of the network so that it can optimize the usage of the network for enterprises."
