An Open Framework for the Assessment of 5G Business Cases and Investments

Beyond technological advances, 5G aims to establish an open innovation ecosystem with a wide variety of stakeholders and a plethora of new business opportunities. Mobile network operators, digital service providers, communication service providers, and vertical service providers are among the actor roles that co-create and deliver novel 5G-empowered applications. The variety of business relationships in the 5G ecosystem leads to multiple potential value network configurations and business models. In this article, we introduce a framework that enables the assessment of 5G business cases through the techno-economic analysis of alternative value network configurations, business models, cost and revenue structures, infrastructure deployments, and market conditions. The implementation of the framework is enabled by the open 360 Business Model Evaluation tool, which allows the assessment of 5G business cases from different perspectives: per actor business model evaluation, holistic cost-benefit evaluation, and upscaling and replication evaluation. We illustrate the use of our framework assessing the 5G experimentation as a service business case, motivated by the 5G-VINNI experimentation platform.