That’s what Deutsche Telekom (DT) says it’s doing, and they may have a point.
At its 2024 Capital Markets Day press conference reported by Telecom TV, DT CEO Tim Höttges said, “5G is a huge success story. And this is a narrative I would like to bring home. We took a look at the 5G business case. We started early with 5G. Everybody [else] is complaining that you can’t make money with 5G but I can assure you, 5G is our success story.”
Indeed, media coverage of 5G has been in phase 2 of the typical from-hype-to disappointment curve lately, but that coverage has been largely focused on the consumer markets expectation of faster speeds. The greater market opportunities are expected in enterprise applications and “machine” connectivity use cases such as IoT.
According to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry association for global system mobile technology (GSMA), “With slow average revenue per user growth in the connectivity business, revenue diversification remains an imperative for operators. As demand expands for solutions across a range of technology areas (cloud, edge, IoT, security), the B2B segment offers significant growth opportunities.”
How significant? The group’s latest research report highlights “an addressable market of more than $400 billion for operators looking to grow revenues in the B2B space. This equates to approximately 35% of the existing mobile operator revenue base worldwide.”
Can satellite get a piece of that growth?
5G will play a big role in bringing those enterprise services to market, in large part because its foundation in the 3GPP standard bakes in advanced services and interoperability, including interoperability with non-terrestrial networks through 5G NTN.
In his press conference, DT’s Höttges cited the success his company has had both in Europe and through its U.S. T-Mobile group where he noted, that at T-Mobile US, “we deployed the 2.5GHz spectrum across the country, and we have blown out the lights of Verizon and AT&T… because we were able to provide countrywide 5G services while these guys were waiting for the clearing of the 3.5 GHz spectrum with a totally different propagation, another build-out logic and more expensive investments – our success is very much based on this clear commitment toward 5G based on the mid-band spectrum.”
The DT companies are betting on scale advantages including those enabled by standards-based technologies like 5G. 5G network coverage in the European national companies is set to rise from 78 percent currently to 95 percent in 2027.
According to DT, Brand Finance ranks Deutsche Telekom as the industry’s most valuable brand worldwide, up by 84 percent compared with 2020. Maybe they’re working on the right narrative.
