Survey: MNOs expect 5G to create enterprise opportunities

It also finds that 34 per cent of MNOs are planning to offer commercial 5G services to this sector by the end of 2019, more than doubling to 84 per cent by the end of 2020. More than 65 per cent of European operators said that their enterprise customers have already expressed interest in 5G services.

The survey reports that they Europe are optimistic that they will be able to leverage early 5G deployments to enhance existing enterprise services, such as unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). Operators in Europe have identified healthcare as the sector that offers the most revenue potential for 5G. This is closely followed by government and public sector in second place, while automotive and manufacturing jointly occupy the third spot.

In addition, nearly all operators in the region believed the overwhelming use case for 5G in the enterprise will be to replace existing fixed-line connections with mobile services. This was backed up by their claims that the most common types of devices they expect to ship to support 5G services in the early stages will be routers, PC dongles and eventually, handsets.