When Telstra unveiled its Telstra 2022 strategy in June 2018 the Australian Financial Reviewbranded it a “declaration of war on Optus, Vodafone and TPG Telecom,” saying they were “clearly going to be most obvious victims of [Telstra’s] 2022 strategy, which prioritises mobile above everything else in Telstra’s sprawling portfolio of businesses.”
The AFR identified three key components of Telstra’s strategy: offer unlimited data on all mobile plans; take out the complexity of contracts by reducing the total mobile plans from 1800 to 20; adopt “arguably the most aggressive roll out of program for 5G in the world.”
That last point is debatable. Carriers around the world are falling over each other to claim 5G ‘firsts’, but it begs the question: just how will Telstra use 5G to wage war on the competition?
We’ve heard plenty about the raw capabilities of 5G: higher data rates, low latency, ability to support many more users, but not a lot about another capability: network slicing.
Network slicing promises to offer great scope for the development and deployment of new services for all users, and to create considerable headaches for the ACCC has it strives to police over-enthusiastic and misleading advertising for these new services.
Network slicing is the ability of an operator to partition its 5G network end-to-end, and almost instantaneously, into multiple discrete slices each with different service parameters designed to meet the needs of different users.
For consumers it means that, in the future, all Telstra — and Optus, or Vodafone/TPG services — will not be created equal.
Today differentiation is mainly on data volumes and other service inclusions, and handset deals. Tomorrow the scope will be much greater. For example, you might be able to get a cheaper service that operates in a limited area, if you don’t travel.
Network slices could be created for MVNOs that are inferior in performance to that of the parent network, or that could have features specific to each MVNO.
Substantial slicing returns envisaged
For telcos the returns from network slicing could be very substantial. In early 2018 Ericsson and BT produced a joint report: Scalable network opportunities: An economic study of 5G network slicing for IoT service deployment. It did not restrict the use of slicing to IoT use cases, but it did only consider slicing in the core network, while acknowledging that slicing can extend end-to-end across the radio and transport network domains.
The study found that incremental revenue generated from new service introduction in the network slicing scenario was 35 percent more than in one big network, that opex was 40 percent lower, creating a total economic benefit of 150 percent.
Telstra’s view on network slicing
The best insight into Telstra’s 5G slicing plans and what they might mean in terms of new services is to be found in a presentation by Telstra executive David Aders, general manager, development and innovation, Wireless Network Engineering GSA, in a webinar on network slicing for 5Gorganised by TelecomRadar in December 2017. (You can still view Aders’ and all the other presentations after completing the free registration.)
Aders said “selective enablement of features” was one aim of network slicing. “In todays’ networks we tend to support all kinds of services within one single EPC [Evolved Packet Core of the network]. This often leads to some complexities and incompatibilities between features in some use cases,” he said.
“We are looking at how we determine different KPIs for a slice, how you dimension different elements of slices.”
Aders reviewed eight different possible types of network slices that Telstra might offer. The one most relevant to possible future consumer service differentiation was mobile broadband slicing.
Today’s service, Aders said, was one-size fits all with KPIs set for things like user plane latency, how fast the service can recover from a complete failure and how much data is used per subscriber.
He said: “In some cases you might want to supply a lower ARPU or a cheaper version of mobile broadband that has lower KPIs and we can dimension and design a slice that supports that particular use case.”
Bespoke 5G services on demand
Aders also envisage bespoke services available on demand, supported by dedicated network slices.
“You can go into a McDonalds today and customise your burger to your needs. You can go to the menu and select the ingredients that suit your requirements and that trigger the orchestration in the kitchen to create that burger, hopefully within a minute.
“We want to get that same experience into creating the network slice as a service, Therefore we want a set of orderable ingredients that make sense to a particular customer or customer segment that enable the creation of a network slice that meets their needs: the number of users within that slice, the geographic locations of that slice, what sort of quality of service or availability the speeds we want to offer, value added services such as security, parental controls, firewalls and reporting requirement.
“Then to press the go button and be able to activate that within a minute.”
Dressing up the slices
The scope of 5G network slicing technology will inevitably fuel creativity in service development, and even greater creativity in service promotion and misrepresentation of the capabilities of future services.
We’ve seen numerous initiatives by the ACCC to clamp down on advertising of one simple parameter of fixed broadband services: the download speeds customers can expect. The ACCC has also taken issue with the use of one word that, in truth, is unambiguous: unlimited.
Over in Europe The FTTH Council has published an open letter to EU telecoms ministers, calling for them to stop “misleading fibre advertising” by broadband ISPs offering such services.
“We are witnessing ‘fake fibre’ advertising practices in several Member States using ‘fibre’ or ‘fibre speeds’ in advertisements for copper-based broadband, when the advertised product is not genuinely based on a full fibre connection,” the Council said.
And this fake advertising is working: 24 percent of UK residents surveyed said they had fibre cables running all the way to their home, but FTTH is available to three percent of UK properties!