Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s frameworkPractical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework

5G still hasn’t powered large-scale deployments of remote surgery or self-driving cars, but its advances over 4G are delivering something more meaningful to telecoms weary of network capital expenses: the ability to build profitable business models on private 5G networks and network-sliced services.

That was the key takeaway of a panel last week at MWC 2025 with a title that itself could be read as a correction to the industry’s past excesses of 5G hype: "5G Innovations That Matter: Real-World Use Cases Driving Value."

Pivoting to a platform business

Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo unit, started the discussion by recalling a prediction shared at a board meeting of the Singapore carrier in 2018: “5G will be the last G that telcos will ever build, own and operate if we can't break out of this commodity business.”

Singtel’s breakout came via a pivot—“from building just 5G infrastructure to being a platform operator,” Chang said. In 2022, the company launched its Paragon platform, which he described as “basically like an app store for a country's infrastructure.”

For example, Hyundai Motor Group used this platform to automate a new factory in Singapore with a campus-wide 5G network and mobile edge computing. The facility, opened in 2023, uses an array of robots to build Ioniq 5 electric vehicles—including a heavily customized self-driving version built for the U.S. firm Aptiv.

Related:Here's where you can find our MWC 2025 coverage

(So the prophecy of 5G making autonomous vehicles a reality is coming to pass after all, just not in the way we were told.)

Singtel has also begun licensing Paragon to other telcos, giving it yet another revenue stream. He cited the Thai operator AIS as one such example of a telco that needed Singtel’s help to get out of a commodity rut: “They had a 5G super-fast network looking for a problem to solve.”

Chang’s advised carriers not to fall into thinking that these transformations should be a to-do item for the indefinite future: “Too early, too early, too early, then you realize it's too late.”

A slice is nice

Another speaker on that panel, Alexia González Fanfalone, head of the OECD’s Connectivity Services and Infrastructures Unit, talked about the “revolutionary aspects” of network slicing. She pointed to T-Mobile’s recent launch of a T-Priority—a service for first responders that runs on a slice of that carrier’s 5G network. 

T-Mobile’s tech president Ulf Ewaldsson gave his own endorsement of slicing in a talk at MWC Monday. 

“We started off doing it in sports to really prove that this is going to be game-changing,” he said, explaining that T-Mobile had used network slicing during the Las Vegas Grand Prix to provide such specialized services as broadcasting camera footage.

“We can move that into our enterprise business,” Ewaldsson continued. “This puts us in a position where we can move from telco to techco.”

The CEO of UAE-based e& Hatem Dowidar made the exact same boast at MWC, telling Light Reading’s Anne Morris: “We were a telco. Today, I believe we are a techco.”

In her part of the panel, González Fanfalone also pointed to low-cost but low-latency 5G RedCap in factories and much faster fixed wireless access in homes and business—both of which can benefit from network slicing—as other transformative applications of 5G and therefore of interest to the OECD.

“It’s bringing new economic opportunities across economic sectors,” she said of FWA.

Necessary ingredients

Standalone 5G is the single most important ingredient in offering these services and platforms, but wireless carriers have been slow to adopt it in the U.S. and abroad. González Fanfalone cited OECD data showing that only 25% of operators worldwide were investing in SA.

“5G standalone [is] where we see industries transform and change people's lives,” she said. 

Another of Wednesday’s panelists emphasized that network operators will need to learn new skills to complete their own transformation. Amdocs technology division president Avishai Sharlin called it the “5G chasm” between carriers and hyperscalers, urging operators to cultivate expertise in open APIs and (of course) AI.

Finally, there’s the murky issue of regulation. New FCC chair Brendan Carr used his share of a policy-perspectives keynote Monday to celebrate the demise of net-neutrality rules that he derided as “heavy-handed regulation,” suggesting that T-Priority could not exist with them in place.

But T-Mobile’s network-slicing efforts started years ago, not the day after the election. And before November, many net-neutrality advocates voiced their angst over the prospect that carriers would use slicing to work around those regulations by defining it as a specialized service. 

Saying “Technology, I think, is agnostic to borders,” González Fanfalone urged regulators to cooperate between countries to give operators a little more clarity. “We need interoperable regulatory frameworks.” 

But considering the policy and even trust chasm that Trump 2.0 has opened up between the U.S. and Europe, the safer bet is for more squabbling.