Whereas earlier generations of mobile infrastructure were relied upon for simple voice and later, light data usage, the advent of the smart phone and any army of apps in the billions has changed all of that. Today’s mobile networks are mission- and even life- critical to the businesses and organizations they support. Unfortunately, today’s Best Effort networks simply can’t guarantee performance, and thus their value, at whatever aggregate speeds they achieve will be continue to be perceived as low-value commodities.  Network Slicing changes all of that by allowing carriers for the first time to deliver rock-solid SLA-assured connectivity.

Selling network slices moves the operator’s business in a dramatically different direction; From being a low-value bit pipe to being a core strategic asset to the businesses they serve, and a trusted vendor to consumers. SLA-assured connectivity-as-a-service gives carriers a model for delivering high value experiences in an enormous new market that touches on all facets of the mobile-enabled digital lifestyle. As each network slice will address a unique customer need, carriers will be able to deliver multiple slices to each customer based on different needs and contexts.

SELLING SLA-ASSURED SLICES

But to get there and in order to transition successfully to selling slices, mobile operators will need to take a deep dive into their consumer and business segments and quickly turn those into slice-based capacity / latency assured products and services. And although this will come to its full end-to-end fruition in 5G, the path to that business-critical eventuality is paved in 4G with the introduction of network slicing; in today’s slicing-ready LTE networks.

In the context of SLA-assured connectivity we see a number of use cases within multiple categories (“Life-Critical”, “Mission-Critical”, “Media & Entertainment” Etc.) all of them being delivered appropriate combinations of static or dynamic slices based on capacity or delay sensitivity or a combination of both. At the bottom of the pyramid, which also generally represents the scale of the market, we see a set of miscellaneous differentiated service categories including an ad-sponsored, “Zero Rating” which here we have as the only use case being delivered “Best Effort” mobile connectivity. Today, nearly every large technology company maintains one or more private networks that deliver SLA-assured throughout and a certain, pre-defined measure of capacity and ultra-low latency from a commercial ISP. One need only think of today’s Content Delivery Networks like Akamai, and their provisioning technologies like FastTCP to help their business customers sell video subscription services to end users to see the point. Slicing in this context is already very much core of today’s cloud Internet DNA.