It would be fair to note that connectivity providers often have developed and offered many features and services they believed customers would want. The catch is that revenue for connectivity providers is cost for enterprises, businesses and consumers who are asked to buy and use the features and services.
Connectivity providers tend to prefer selling turned-up services; enterprises often prefer to buy dark fiber. Sometimes regulations prevent sales of enhanced quality products, even if there is conceivable consumer demand. Best effort internet access provides an example.
It is conceivable there is demand for latency and jitter-controlled internet access, but regulations bar the sale of such products under the rubric of network neutrality.
Network slicing, the ability to create virtual private networks that run end to end on 5G networks, provides another opportunity to find out where demand might lie for private networks whose characteristics and performance are better matched to some use cases.
Of course, to the extent network slicing offers business value, potential buyers will have incentives to explore “do it yourself” alternatives when it saves them money. In that sense, edge computing networks are an alternative to network slices.
If ultra-low-latency applications are those which could benefit from network slices, one alternative is do commuting at the edge, and not sending data across wide area networks that are optimized for low latency. In many use cases, the value of ultra-low-latency computing is supplied by edge computing services, with non-real time backup across wide area networks.
Perhaps ironically, consumer customers who have few other alternatives might be good candidates for internet access with quality of service features a network slice offered by a connectivity provider. But regulations often prevent such offers. Gaming services, work from home conferencing and ultra-high-definition video are among potential use cases.
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