Telecom Council Members open their discussion on the metaverse to the public with an analyst view of the market, and then, in an unpanel format, we open the meeting to our audience, asking you to brainstorm the burning questions that our expert panel should address.
Silicon Valley, California, November 10, 2022/Meeting Recap/ The Telecom Council frequently hosts roundtable discussions among our members, where the telcos and other stakeholders can discuss and share ideas around topics of interest. We invite qualified experts as speakers, and then involve the entire room in the discussion. This week, our topic was the misunderstood Metaverse. Even in an environment where Meta’s market cap has dropped by over two thirds, our discussion still concluded that the Metaverse is real, it’s important, and it’s of interest to network operators.
Among take-aways from our discussion, the first and most important thing was that the Metaverse is not only the consumer-facing, or remote-worker ideas floated by Zuckerberg and co. In fact, it runs much deeper, to less-hyped use cases in enterprise. And, like MANY inventions (Blackberry, PCs, broadband, GPS nav…) this one is starting in the enterprise, and the consumer visions of Facebook may someday arrive, but the real and useful cases today are in business.
| Tired | Wired |
| Team meetings | Gaming (already done for ages) |
| Video conferences | Digital Twins: factory floor |
| Legs | Digital Twins: product design |
| Avatars | Digital Twins: rapid simulation, AI design, iteration |
| Just hanging out socially | Remote driving (crane operator, bulldozer, cars) |
| Training (machine operation, flight sim, etc) | |
| Customer Experience (virtual retail for support) |
We had polled the room at the start, and our group was overall slightly bearish about the prospects for Metaverse 2020-2030. But at the end of our discussion, with its experts focused on ROI-friendly enterprise use cases, our audience shifted into bullish territory. One of the key questions, of course, was is there any revenue in this for network operators, or will they again be a dumb pipe. To that issue, it seemed that the answer was that carriers would have the opportunity to offer a tier of service at a surcharge (say $5/mo for consumers/gamers) for “super low-latency 5G”. For this tier of service, they could invest in additional Edge compute and 5G Ultra Low-latency connections end-to-end, and provide a better experience for Metaverse applications. Of course, they can also deploy slicing, or Private 5G to larger enterprise customers.
The Metaverse is here, and growing. It’s just not being done (for now) by the company making the most noise. But look just past the noise, and you might spot some growing opportunities.