Carlos Reyes —CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
In meeting its long-term potential, the Philippines is expected to achieve an average annual economic growth rate of 5.6 percent over the next two years. However, inflation will be a challenge this year with local food supply constraints, growing global commodity costs, foreign market instabilities and new COVID-19 variations contributing to high inflation rates.
This further emphasizes the need for digitalization as a critical driver of long-term economic resilience. Here, the Philippines has made significant progress in recent years, with efforts undertaken to develop digital infrastructure. Given the Philippines’ growing maturity in 5G adoption, 5G Core is emerging as a catalyst to help more of the country’s industries to tap into the benefits brought by this new era of connectivity.
Turbocharging a new digital era with 5G Core
5G Core is a new architecture designed to support growing digital transformation needs, especially in the Philippines where there is increasing demand for high-bandwidth applications for various industries like transportation, health care and port operations. The 5G Core technology provides faster speeds, ultra-reliable connectivity and lower latency, which are needed to drive digital transformation.
Due to its scale-in and scale-out capability, 5G Core can help increase network capacity, enabling more users to access faster speeds and better connectivity. This is especially with the 5G end-to-end network providing operators with network slicing, which would allow network optimization and more efficient resource allocation.
As a key capability of 5G Core, network slicing enables communication services providers (CSPs) to monetize services by creating discrete network slices that meet required levels of performance for individual customers and services, namely for enhanced security and quality of service purposes.
CSPs can choose to deploy 5G Core over the cloud—in which case, it can also be offered as Software-as-a-Service—or in some on-demand services at the edge and far edge computing. This enables more advanced use cases such as automated vehicles and robots and predictive maintenance, providing more avenues for companies to boost productivity and meet safety goals.
Moving to the future with 5G
In the Philippines, major maritime ports, factories and other key industries have begun to incorporate 5G in their day-to-day operations. This will expand further with the commitment of local CSPs to support the development of quality digital infrastructure and increasing access to affordable connectivity in the Philippines.
Yet, taking this further in terms of implementation requires closer collaboration between the nation’s CSPs, governments, and other economic and technology stakeholders, especially to create a regulatory environment conducive to 5G Core deployments.
Continued investment in 5G Core technology can help ensure that enterprises, consumers and governments can fully benefit from its capabilities, thereby strategically positioning CSPs to propel the Philippines’ digital economy growth. —CONTRIBUTED INQ
The author is head of Nokia Philippines