Every operator going to Copenhagen this June will see dozens of demos. Here’s why the slice-aware operations Catalyst with Wavelo, CGI, BT Group, and Rapax is the one that matters most for your 5G revenue roadmap.
By Shawn Ennis•June 16, 2026 • 6 min read
By the time you read this, the schedules are set, the badges are printed, and the flights to Copenhagen are booked. TMF DTW Ignite 2026 is a week away, and every operator going has a question they’re asking themselves on the flight over: which demonstrations are worth my time?
I want to argue, directly and without subtlety, that one of them is ours.
This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a practical recommendation from someone who’s spent 25 years in telecom operations and has watched the industry go through three major operational paradigm shifts. The one happening right now — the move from static services to ephemeral, slice-bound, mission-driven services — is the biggest. And the operational gap it’s exposing is the single biggest reason 5G slicing revenue hasn’t materialized for the industry yet.
What the Catalyst is, briefly
At the Mission Garage at DTW Ignite, four companies are demonstrating end-to-end slice-aware operations: Wavelo (BSS), CGI (systems integration), BT Group (the operator customer profile), and Rapax (observability, correlation, service analytics, and visualization).
This scenario is a three-site drone surveillance network at Port Canaveral. 113 devices. Cameras, switches, antennas, drones, edge compute. Slices spinning up for individual missions. Topology that reshapes itself every 60 seconds as the drones move. The full ephemeral service lifecycle — from provisioning to revenue recognition — happening in under a minute, end to end, demonstrated live.
Why you should care, even if you don’t sell port surveillance
Drones at a port are the most visceral, least abstract way to demonstrate what slice-aware operations actually look like in practice. But the architecture is general. The same operational model handles:
- A 5G slice for a stadium concert with SLA-backed performance
- Private 5G for an enterprise event lasting eight hours
- Connected vehicle handoffs across cell boundaries
- Live broadcast slices from sports venues
- Emergency response slices when a disaster strikes
If your roadmap includes any of these — and if you’re a Tier 1 or Tier 2 operator with a 5G investment to defend, it should — the operational architecture you’ll see in the Mission Garage is what you’ll need to deliver them.
Three things I want you to look for
Walking a conference floor, every demo looks impressive. Here’s what to actually evaluate at this one.
1. Does the topology graph update in real time?
Most OSS topology visualizations are static diagrams. Pretty. Inert. They tell you what your network looked like when someone last ran inventory. The whole point of slice-aware operations is that the topology changes constantly — drones moving, slices anchoring to new edge nodes, mobile assets re-associating with different antennas. If the topology view doesn’t update as the demo runs, the platform isn’t actually slice-aware.
Watch the geospatial map when the drone launches. The icon should move every 60 seconds. The connections to antennas should change as the drone flies. That’s the bare minimum.
2. Does the service catalog handle a 30-minute service?
Ask the demo team to launch a mission. Then look at the service catalog. There should be a new entry — with a name, a start time, an SLA, and a billing event — that didn’t exist before the launch. When the mission ends, it should close automatically.
Most service catalogs were designed for permanent services. A mission that exists for 30 minutes literally has nowhere to live in them. If the catalog can’t handle ephemeral service lifecycles natively, slicing-as-a-product can’t be sold against an SLA.
3. Does correlation actually consolidate alarms?
Ask the team to trigger a Cisco switch port flap. A traditional OSS would generate 50+ independent alarms — every camera that lost connectivity, every drone that lost backhaul, every interface that timed out. The correlation engine should turn that into one alert with full impact context: “X cameras affected, Y antennas degraded, Z missions at risk, SLA breach probability N%.”
If the demo still shows 50 alarms, you’re looking at legacy correlation with a slice-shaped label slapped on it.
The shortcut: If you only have ten minutes at the booth, ask one question — “show me an alarm storm and tell me which one mission was impacted.” A platform that can answer that in real time is a platform that can operate ephemeral services.
The honest part
Conferences are full of overclaims. Every demo says “AI-native.” Every dashboard looks like a Bloomberg terminal. Every architecture diagram has the right boxes in the right places.
The Catalyst is a proof-of-concept. We are honest about that. It’s a simulator, not a live production deployment. What it proves is that the architecture works — that the data pipeline, the correlation engine, the service modeling, and the visualization layer can do what we say they do. Production deployment is the next step, with operators ready to take it there.
What the Catalyst is NOT is theoretical slideware. The code runs. The decisions execute. The drone moves on the map. The math comes out under 60 seconds.
The practical details
TMF DTW Ignite 2026 runs June 23-25 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. The Catalyst lives in the Mission Garage — the conference’s dedicated proof-of-concept zone. Stop by, watch a drone fly, ask the questions above, and decide for yourself whether slice-aware operations matter to your roadmap.
If you want the technical depth before you visit, the white paper is below. If you want to schedule a private walkthrough at the booth, the booking link is at the bottom of this page.
See you in Copenhagen.
Get the white paper before you visit the booth
The technical depth behind what you’ll see in the Mission Garage.
About the author Shawn Ennis is the Founder & CEO of Rapax and Citus Technologies. With 25+ years in telecom operations, Shawn previously founded Assure1 (acquired by Oracle in 2021), holds 12 patents in telecom OSS/BSS, and hosts the Transformation Leaders Podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.