What makes 5G-A so promising? Operators are excited because it enables them to reimagine the value of next-generation networks with a focus on advanced, enterprise-grade features and game-changing performance. With 5G-A, operators can tailor services and use cases to meet specific requirements for positioning, control, and guaranteed results.
For enterprise customers across various industries, 5G-A can redefine industrial IoT operations, time-sensitive communications, and private network deployments. New services, such as better edge integration, more granular network slicing and device energy efficiency, are ideal for smart factories, automated transportation and other applications.
Consumers also benefit from more immersive experiences provided by XR-enabled networks, expanded service coverage through satellite support, and dynamic QoS management for more differentiated service offerings.
5G is fundamental to core service innovation
At the heart of these new monetization opportunities is the 5G core. In 3GPP Release 18, the core has been transformed into a revenue engine, which serves as the primary control point for intelligent service delivery. By enabling real-time analytics, edge offload, greater programmable control and exposure functions, it empowers developers, partners and enterprises to create value on top of the network. Examples of these new capabilities include:
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Strong Slicing and Policy Control: Resilience is fundamental to evolving enterprise and consumer use cases, and 5G-A provides advanced network slicing to meet new demands. Release 18 lets operators support slice replacement, partial slices, and slice capacity enforcement. The 5G core plays a critical role, offering advanced policy control and session management capabilities for end-to-end resource orchestration and more robust policy enforcement. -
multi,Access and edge integration: Multi-access capabilities are becoming increasingly important for edge use cases and other connectivity requirements. With 5G-A, organizations can use edge computing, non-3GPP access, such as Wi-Fi, and local breakout for access traffic steering, switching, and splitting (ATSSS), which connects mobile and Wi-Fi services. To facilitate integration, the 5G core can make path selection decisions and apply analytics for optimal reliability and performance. -
Innovation in terms of vertical use:With 5G-A, operators can support increasingly sophisticated use cases such as satellite integration, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and complex IoT deployments. All of these services have special security, QoS, and subscription profile requirements. The 5G core performs important functions such as profile management. This handles new interactions for capabilities such as control plane and user plane event exposure. It also helps ensure stable sessions across all edge and RAN topologies. -
Exposure and Monetization Capabilities:Release 18 extends several 5G core exposure features to enable operators to monetize real-time policy and advanced analytics. Leveraging the 5G core, operators can orchestrate slicing, local breakout, and dynamic QoS. Together, these capabilities set the stage for great user experiences and attractive recurring revenue streams.
Continuous testing and reassurance are essential for success
Like any transformative technology, 5G-A offers new features and updates that must be thoroughly tested before being implemented on operational networks. Operators will want to perform traditional functionality and interoperability testing, as well as assess safety and performance.
Since modern mobile infrastructures are constantly evolving and changing, 5G-A testing must be continuous to ensure optimal service quality, extending from planning to production networks and beyond.
With comprehensive testing across the entire lab-to-live lifecycle, operators can reduce risk and costs, accelerate time to market and deliver a better experience to end customers. Major methods include:
Digital Twins and Simulators
Engineers often use network and traffic emulators to test new mobile features in an isolated sandbox environment before making them available to customers. These emulators essentially establish “digital twins” of 5G networks for easier experimentation and manipulation, without the need for expensive testing labs and equipment. An emulator can perform diverse tasks, such as modeling intermittent non-terrestrial network (NTN) satellite coverage or creating millions of virtual EaredCap sensors with stress-testing capabilities to validate resiliency.
Digital twins simulate 5G core functions, enabling operators to simulate real-world challenges to validate vendor performance, interoperability, security, compliance, lifecycle management and more.
Hybrid emulation and OTA testing
Some operators who want to combine the best of virtual and physical lab testing are combining digital twin emulation with over-the-air (OTA) testing using real handsets. This repeatable hybrid approach is effective for user experience validation. This lets operators reflect and evaluate real customer behavior from device to RAN and core.
Hybrid emulation is particularly effective for complex scenarios such as roaming, mobility, dual-SIM usage, and concurrent application usage. It may also reveal performance issues that are difficult to detect in other testing environments.
Continuous testing within the CI/CD pipeline
Today’s 5G networks are dynamic, constantly evolving environments. With cloud-native micro-services and vendors deploying updates, a continuous testing approach is essential. This testing should be tightly integrated into the CI/CD pipeline, where each change is subject to an automated “validation test”. Testing should include performance, security, flexibility, interoperability, and other key parameters.
Continuous testing can also support lifecycle management. The pipeline automatically re-runs regression tests against the live instance and performs automatic rollback when a failure occurs. This closed-loop approach enables operators to innovate, release, and monetize 5G-A services with complete confidence.
Active Testing for Service Assurance
Active testing in live operational networks is important for service assurance. This approach introduces synthetic traffic from the device edge through the RAN, transport network, 5G core, and real application servers.
Many 5G-A features will only demonstrate their true behavior when the network is subjected to end-to-end testing under realistic traffic conditions. Proactive testing helps operators uncover hidden policy conflicts, inconsistencies or other issues before they impact paying customers with service degradation. Proactive testing agents can also provide key performance indicators (KPIs) that form the basis of objective evidence of performance and a trustworthy set of service level agreements (SLAs). These metrics provide the basis for turning innovations into monetizable services.
Moving forward into 5G-A with confidence
As the pace of change accelerates and competitive pressures increase, it is more important than ever for operators to ensure that their investments are delivering the expected results and revenue opportunities. By proactively incorporating continuous testing and advanced practices into their planning, deployment and operations, mobile operators can take a big step forward in meeting the 5G demands of today and tomorrow.
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