Ericsson: Tackling Network Slicing’s Execution Challenges

As always, Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report provides plenty of facts for senior telco leaders and executives to get their teeth into.

In this in-depth analysis, Telco Magazine explores the report's findings, specifically focusing on the extent to which mobile operators are capitalising on 5G Standalone Access’s network slicing capabilities. 

Out of the 300 service providers Ericsson tracked across 134 markets, the vendor identified 151 with differentiated connectivity offerings, of which 84 are commercially available. That’s up from the 65 out of 118 seen in the previous report. Europe and Asia Pacific account for the lion’s share of commercial offerings, representing 41% and about 24% of the global total, respectively.

“Early movers’ experiences show that customers are willing to pay for guaranteed performance at key moments, such as during a gaming session or for priority connectivity at a crowded venue,” the report says. It adds that app-integrated offers are 20 times more effective than any other marketing channel.

Common pitfalls

However, it points out that reaching customers during these key moments remains the “most underestimated” of the execution challenges around delivering a commercial network slicing service. 

“Most offerings are still marketed in broadly traditional ways, with the only notable shift being the use of the word ‘guarantee’ alongside a connectivity performance metric,” Ericsson states in the report. In the company’s view, this is a missed opportunity and messaging should be about outcomes rather than guaranteeing technical parameters. 

Ericsson also warns that despite the rapid growth in the number of these offerings, many operators are struggling to execute at scale. It notes that often “the vision is there but when the conversation turns to execution, important gaps appear”.

In addition to the formidable challenge of reaching potential customers when they are in the right frame of mind to pay a premium for differentiated connectivity, Ericsson has observed the following common pain points:

• Technical requirements may not be fully aligned with service design: The network capability exists, but the majority of operators have not updated their operational systems to provision, monitor and assure such services at scale.
• An underdeveloped marketing strategy: Customer segmentation, pricing logic and channel strategy all need to be worked through.
• Go-to market assumptions about how customers will discover and adopt the offering: These often do not hold up under scrutiny.

The vendor identifies a fundamental challenge: “Differentiated connectivity requires alignment across the entire organisation, spanning technology, business and customer experience functions in ways that traditional service plans did not. Getting that alignment right takes time, cross-functional effort and a willingness to work through the details.”

Putting it into practice

The report also includes an article co-written with SoftBank that covers the Japanese operator’s real-world trial of multiple network slices during the 2026 Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix. 

The co-authored piece contained two key takeaways. 

First, to reduce the risk that allocating resources for high-value use cases might degrade the experience for ordinary attendees, SoftBank adopted a philosophy of raising the floor for everyone, then applying intelligent control. 

Second, the study also insists that “per-slice SLA management is only operationally meaningful when monitoring granularity is fine enough to keep pace with actual network behaviour”. The traditional 15-minute window used in traditional KPIs simply doesn’t cut it.