“How Telcos can leverage the Metaverse Continuum Opportunity”

In an Email Q&A with Voice & Data, Saurabh Kumar Sahu, MD & Lead – Communications, Media and Technology, Accenture in India, discusses the opportunities, trends that Metaverse presents, and how Telcos can leverage the Metaverse Continuum Opportunity.

How do you see the role of telcos evolving in the context of metaverse?

The metaverse is a continuum of emerging capabilities, technologies and experiences that applies across all aspects of business – from virtual to reality, consumer to worker and from the world of cloud and artificial intelligence to extended reality, blockchain, digital twins and edge technologies. The expansion of the metaverse is pushing industries, including the telecom sector, to extend from solely physical presence to fully or hybrid digital ecosystems. 5G with its superior speed and ultra-low latency benefits combined with the latest technologies, will be a key enabler of the metaverse. Telcos through their networks and large subscriber base, are strongly positioned to capitalize on the significant market opportunity (estimated by Citi to be $13trn by 2030) in the metaverse.

Not only is the next-gen connectivity that telcos provide critically important to the success of new experiences in the metaverse, but the strategies telcos make to evolve or revolutionize their business will be essential to their future success. We see three potential roles emerging for telcos in this new virtual environment — the Disruptor (focusing on developing new services, experiences, and platforms), the Orchestrator (focused on developing the enabling capabilities for the metaverse, example identity, payments and trust) and the Performance Player (focused on building and running metaverse ready networks). These roles define paths to purpose-driven growth.

What are the opportunities for telcos with the advent of metaverse and web3?

With the metaverse and web3, telcos have an opportunity to play a crucial role in shaping and defining the next digital era. Telcos can benefit immensely from this next evolution of the internet, as it can become a formula to obtain income from the 5G network that they are deploying. web3 will provide an opportunity for telcos to transform their role in the technology ecosystem beyond traditional connectivity. In the future, telcos can use distributed ledger technology with digital technologies such as edge computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital twins, and hybrid cloud platforms to build new business models and operational approaches.

According to an industry estimate, 5G will enable Indian mobile service providers to generate USD 17 billion in incremental revenue from enterprise by 2030.

However, to take advantage of these opportunities, telcos need to re-evaluate their own online presence and work on using these technologies to connect better with customers, partners and their own workforce.

New technologies like the metaverse and 5G also raise expectations for digital and connectivity conveniences. Telcos will need a deep understanding of the changing technology landscape and shifts in consumer behaviour and expectations. While we focus on the positive opportunities that these developments will bring along, it is known that more interconnectivity increases security and privacy threats. Telcos can take this opportunity to capitalize on their high levels of consumer trust to provide secure and authentic communications across industries in the metaverse.

What are the top technology trends that telcos can leverage to redefine our digital future?

5G is designed to maximize advantages from emerging technology trends that helps a telco become end to end solutions provider beyond just trusted provider of connectivity. 5G network virtualization and cloudification are two top technology trends that can both create a next generation network and redefine our digital future. Previous network generations used equipment that included tightly integrated hardware, software, tools and services. But now there are more and more software defined networks (SDN) that disaggregate the hardware from software creating more options in the network value chain in terms of better economics, ease of scalability, quicker time to market, higher flexibility in working with ecosystem partners and new business models.

According to an industry estimate, 5G will enable Indian mobile service providers to generate USD 17 billion in incremental revenue from enterprises by 2030.

But building this next generation network is just the beginning, there is still a need to roll it out quickly and customize with a network slice of the public network or through a Private Cellular Network. Also, having this 5G next generation network enabled key technologies will accelerate digital transformation with synergistic technology trends, such as: AI/ML for network automation, edge to bring computing physically closer to where the data is created and extended reality (e.g. Virtual Readily, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality) to drive the Metaverse and create new B2C and B2B solutions. Finally, 5G is designed with in-built security to ensure peace of mind for the users with sensitive business and personal data.

How can telcos become sustainability stewards – for the industry and beyond?

According to an Accenture research, despite an 8x increase in data traffic, operational emissions from the information and communications technology (ICT) sector could remain flat, and if the potential impact of Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs) and Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are included, operational emissions across mobile networks, fixed networks, and datacentres could decrease by nearly 40% by 2030. That is because telcos are well positioned to pioneer sustainability in their operations, being aligned to enterprises across industries, billions of customers, and a network of suppliers.

Telcos can leverage a “data driven green network transformation” via green benchmarks data from our crowdsourced data and calibrated via predictive analytics and other advanced tools to optimise energy usage whilst maintaining customer satisfactions. This would not overpower network, for example during night time, non-peak times to optimal performance per gigawatt. Accenture provide this “holistic” end to end operations view managing the network, site and operations including data centers to drive energy efficiency, carbon reduction and network opex efficiency.

In green operations we support retiring legacy, low-efficiency components, and transitioning to renewable energy sources. For example, the Radio Access Network (RAN) can play a key role in this transition to lower emissions in network operations by reducing down-time in the network, resiliency initiatives make a significant contribution to reduction in emissions and network optimization with AI can enable telcos to qualify the impact of extreme weather risk on network assets, plan the potential response, and proactively harden the network.

With the launch of 5G in India, how do you see adoption scaling?

India has been on a steady progressive path to adopt 5G and multitude of new consumer and business cases unleashed by 5G around manufacturing, entertainment, healthcare, retail, energy, transportation may play a key role in accelerating India’s key goals towards growth, sustainability, job creation and competitiveness. Telcos have been developing the necessary ecosystem to help accelerate its adoption. This involves setting up innovation centres and labs to test next generation network integration and innovation use cases. We strongly believe 5G will play a disruptive role for enterprises as it has the potential to create new products, services, and revenue streams, while delivering cost and productivity benefits and supporting sustainability and resiliency. According to an industry estimate, 5G will enable Indian mobile service providers to generate USD 17 billion in incremental revenue from enterprises by 2030. To scale its adoption at an enterprise level new partnerships and collaboration models need to be established by telcos with other industry sectors. Skilling will also play a critical role in its adoption. As 5G enabled smartphone prices reduce, we expect wider adoption of 5G in the next two to three years in the consumer segment.

By Saurabh Kumar Sahu

MD & Lead-Communications, Media and Technology, Accenture in India

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