Monetising 5G SA: Commercial models for QOD to slicing
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As 5G SA deployments grow, more telcos will be in a position to offer differentiated connectivity. But the path to effective monetisation is not clear or easy. This report explores the most promising use cases and monetisation mechanisms that telcos should focus on.
Description
Format: PDF file
Pages: 34
Author: Rosalind Craven
Publication date: April 2026
Introduction
Slicing was a key promise of 5G that would create new value, but with standalone rollout slow, dynamic network slicing is being pushed back to an ever-receding future. It is worth remembering why slicing was such an important part of 5G, explore how these objectives can be met today and the roadmap towards the original vision.
5G was designed to bring new revenues for telcos by helping them move away from being dumb pipes, turning their networks into enablers of value rather than a quantity-defined commodity. Slicing is a way of differentiating levels of service that are tailored specifically to a use case and customer’s needs, delivering the right level of guaranteed network performance on-demand, paid for on an as-needed basis. This vision brings customers in to define their own requirements and opens up the black box of telco networks, offering the option to foster a collaborative space with them so that telcos can break free from their role as a faceless supplier competing on price. In recent years, we have seen this ambition evolve into the concepts of network-as-a-service and telco-as-a-platform.
This momentum comes as an urgent response to customer expectations, who now see their entire tech stacks becoming cloudified and delivered as a service. The new paradigm in all IT is the need for things to just work first time and to only pay for what is used. For telcos, providing connectivity that is exactly tailored to the customer use case (guaranteed by SLAs), could potentially enable them to deliver reliable and quality coverage without having to over provision and forever throw more capacity at the problem, feeding the cycle that leads to commoditisation.
Dynamic network slicing promises just this but it is still far off at commercial scale. Why is this so?
There are two primary paths towards full dynamic slicing based on current efforts in the industry:
- As an API layer built on the public network to optimise network performance through orchestration and prioritisation of traffic for different network parameters. The most advanced stage of this is the QoD API that allows programmability of performance characteristics such as bandwidth and latency without the full end-to-end logical independence of a network slice.
- As an evolution of dedicated private networks that are adopting distributed models in search of a broader market and, in the most advanced form, begin to resemble pre-integrated static slices.
Two routes up the differentiated connectivity mountain
Our insight covers the following key points:
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- The two routes to dynamic slicing
- Use cases for differentiated connectivity
- When does a use case benefit from 5G slicing?
- The road to dynamic network slicing
- Where is the money?
- Going to market with differentiated connectivity
- Anchor customer case study: 5G slicing as a platform for live events (F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix)
- Scale beyond the anchor customer: Learning from three 5G slicing leaders
- Commercial and pricing model innovation
- Conclusion
Technologies and industry terms referenced include: 5G, 5G standalone (SA), As-a-service models, commercial model, Connectivity services, Customer-centric networks, digital transformation, Dynamic network slicing, enterprise, Enterprise use cases, go-to-market, go-to-market strategy, GTM, Infrastructure evolution, KYC, NaaS, Network differentiation, network performance, Network slicing, network-as-a-service, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), New revenue streams, On-demand services, Playbook, pricing model, programmable networks, QoD, Quality of service (QoS), risk, service providers, Service-based architecture, SLA-based connectivity, slicing, Smart Networks, techco, telco strategy, Telco value creation, Telco-as-a-platform, Telecoms, Telecoms business models, Telecoms innovation, Telecoms monetisation
