Mary Lennighan
It is easy to get caught up in the promise of 5G without considering all of the practicalities, especially where developers are concerned.
This is one reason why 56K.Cloud, a Swiss cloud-first consultancy and tech firm, is presenting 5G.dev, The 5G Developer Platform, at CLOUD CITY this week.
The ecosystems around the tooling and processes to develop apps for IoT devices, smartphones, and the applications running in the cloud are already well-established, but mobile networks and their features are not programmatically accessible at scale, explains 56.K Cloud. As such, there is “an untapped possibility,” the company says, that can be opened up by providing network exposure functions, dynamic network slicing, and multi-access edge compute (MEC) in a cloud-native way.
5G.dev allows new 5G possibilities to be integrated into existing development workflows, and helps to create new features and use cases, 56K.Cloud says.
“The public cloud with its accessibility and programmatic developer experience has played an instrumental part in the success of OTT applications,” says Darragh Grealish, co-founder and CTO of 56K.Cloud.
“By providing the same experience for 5G, NEFs and MEC, we will start to see the features of 5G becoming a critical part of modern application development,” Grealish says.
Essentially, 5G.dev will enable telcos to bridge the developer experience gap between end device and the cloud, 56K.Cloud explains. It allows developers to request and use the network features they need, ultimately giving a boost to end-user experience.
Now that’s speaking the telcos’ language! They can promise their customers a whole raft of features with 5G, but failing to meet expectations will have an impact on their return on investment in the new generation of mobile technology.
Indeed, as 56K.Cloud points out, the big question hanging over the industry now, as 5G networks begin to scale, is how to monetize the new opportunities they open up.
“The main consumers of the network are the millions of apps that are developed by companies like Netflix, Facebook, car manufacturers,” the company notes. “By exposing the features of the 5G network in an accessible, consumable, and programmatic way, 5G.dev gives the industry the possibility to build up a new revenue stream,” it says.
“However, to maximize the revenue, the solutions must address the needs of the developers in a way that they are already familiar with today.”
The bottom line? If you want to make money from 5G, don’t forget the developers and don’t forget the role of the public cloud in enabling that.
