GSMA THRIVE NORTH AMERICA: Sampath Sowmyanarayan, president of global enterprise for Verizon’s Business Group (pictured), predicted the operator will begin to see substantial financial benefits from 5G in 2022 as new enterprise use cases begin to scale.

Speaking during a keynote, Sowmyanarayan said he expects the remainder of 2020 and much of 2021 to be focused on proof of concept development and small deployments to test new 5G applications.

He explained the operator is “not taking use cases that were 4G-enabled or 3G-enabled and just putting 5G on top of it”, but instead is working with developers to design entirely new applications which leverage the next-generation technology’s unique characteristics, including speed, low-latency, security and device density.

The executive tipped these use cases to “start getting scale and traction” in 2022, which is “where we see some of the economic benefits of 5G in our system”.

Verizon executives previously stated they did not expect 5G revenue to ramp until at least 2020.

Use cases
Sowmyanarayan and Verizon CTO Kyle Malady highlighted use cases in the industrial and healthcare segments as showing early promise.

Malady noted 5G, mobile edge computing and AI can be combined to help factories more efficiently monitor product quality by proactively spotting defects on their assembly lines.

In healthcare, Sowmyanarayan said 5G could help increase the proportion of routine medical check-ups conducted virtually, or be combined with AI to improve cancer detection.

He pointed to asset tracking as another key use case, stating it could help large hospitals extend the life of their assets and reduce costs.

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