Drones at a port are a great demo because they’re visual and physical. But the real addressable market for slice-aware operations is much larger. Five sectors — and the specific ephemeral services that unlock real revenue in each one.
By Shawn Ennis • August 11, 2026 • 8 min read
Every white paper needs an anchor example. The Catalyst we demonstrated at TMF DTW Ignite this summer used drone surveillance because drones are visceral — you can see them move on a map, you can see the slice instantiate, you can see the SLA fire and clear. The visual hook is unbeatable.
But drones aren’t the addressable market. They’re the proof point.
The real addressable market for slice-aware operations is much larger and much more diverse than any single demo can capture. Below are five sectors where ephemeral services are already creating revenue today — and where the operational gap between what the network can do and what the OSS can support is keeping that revenue smaller than it should be.
1. Live events
Stadiums. Concerts. Sporting events. Festivals. Conferences. The pattern is the same: a few hours of extreme demand at a single geographic location, surrounded by long periods of normal demand. The economics of provisioning permanent capacity for peak load don’t work — most of the year the capacity sits idle. The economics of provisioning a slice for the duration of the event work beautifully.
A typical large stadium event has 50,000+ attendees. Premium connectivity offerings — guaranteed 5 Gbps uplink for journalists, low-latency feeds for broadcasters, dedicated slices for the venue’s payment terminals, special slices for VIP areas — represent serious revenue per event. The Belfast Christmas Market BT slicing trial in early 2025 demonstrated this category: dedicated slice for payment terminals during a high-density retail event, with measurable SLA improvement during peak demand.
The operational requirement: spin up six to ten distinct slices in the four hours before the event, monitor them during the event with mission-scoped RCA, and tear them down cleanly afterward. None of that is technically hard for the network. All of it is operationally hard for traditional OSS.
2. Autonomous and connected vehicles
The slice handoff between cell sites when a vehicle crosses a coverage boundary is a service in itself. It exists for the duration of the vehicle’s traversal of that cell — sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. The SLA on that handoff is critical, because for autonomous vehicles, the cost of an SLA breach is measured in safety, not money.
The revenue model for connected vehicles is just beginning to emerge but the operational requirements are clear. Per-vehicle, per-trip slicing with SLA guarantees, geographic awareness as the vehicle moves, automatic re-anchoring as the slice handoffs between edge nodes, and detailed telemetry on the service quality experienced by each vehicle at each location.
The operational requirement: support tens of thousands of concurrent mobile slices, each with a different geographic footprint, each handing off across cells, each with its own SLA enforcement. The legacy OSS service catalog can’t even model this — the topology updates exceed its refresh cycle by orders of magnitude.
3. Live broadcast and content production
The shift from satellite uplink to 5G-based broadcast uplink is happening right now in sports, news, and event production. Broadcasters need guaranteed low-latency, high-bandwidth uplink for the duration of a broadcast — three hours for a sporting event, one hour for a news segment, two days for a major festival.
The economics are compelling for both parties. The broadcaster gets satellite-replacement performance without satellite-replacement infrastructure. The CSP gets a premium service window with revenue per hour that beats any consumer mobile data plan.
The operational requirement: pre-provisioned slices for known events, on-demand slices for breaking news, geographic awareness for mobile production units, and tight integration between the slice SLA and the broadcaster’s quality monitoring. The slice has to be operationally indistinguishable from a dedicated fiber link — but it only exists for the duration of the broadcast.
4. Healthcare and connected medical services
This is the sector with the highest stakes and the highest potential revenue. Remote surgery, real-time medical imaging, ambulance-to-hospital telemetry during transport, mass-casualty incident response. Each of these is a service that exists for the duration of a clinical event, with SLA requirements that are literally life-and-death.
The regulatory landscape is forming. HIPAA-compliant slicing, EU MDR compliance for medical telecom services, FDA guidance on connected medical devices — all of this is in motion. The operators that get ahead of these regulatory frameworks with operational capability already in place will capture the early enterprise contracts.
The operational requirement: per-patient or per-procedure slices with audit trails, regulatory-compliant data handling, SLA enforcement that produces evidence acceptable in clinical contexts, and integration with hospital IT systems through standardized APIs. The slice metadata becomes part of the medical record.
5. Emergency response and public safety
When a disaster strikes — natural or manmade — the network demand profile inverts. Normal users go silent. First responders need everything. The current operational model is to pre-provision permanent emergency-services slices that sit unused 99% of the time. Slice-aware operations enable a better model: dynamic instantiation of emergency slices on demand, prioritized over normal traffic, geographically scoped to the incident location, and torn down when the incident resolves.
The revenue model is unusual — much of it is regulatory mandate or public-private partnership rather than commercial sale. But the operational sophistication required to deliver it is exactly the same as commercial ephemeral services. Operators that build the capability for public safety also build the capability for everything else on this list.
The operational requirement: instant slice instantiation under stress conditions, geographic scoping to active incidents, priority enforcement against background traffic, real-time visibility for incident commanders, and audit trails for post-incident review.
The pattern across all five sectors
What unites these examples is the shape of the service, not the industry. Every one of them shares the same characteristics:
- Services with defined start and end times measured in hours, not years
- SLA guarantees that apply for the duration of the service
- Geographic specificity tied to where the service is consumed
- Revenue events that align with service completion, not monthly billing cycles
- Operational requirements that exceed what traditional OSS architectures can handle
This is the addressable market for slice-aware operations. Drones at a port are an example. They’re not the boundary of the opportunity. The boundary is the entire ephemeral service category — and that category is large, growing, and increasingly the differentiator between operators that capture 5G investment ROI and operators that don’t.
The math: Pick the sector closest to your existing customer base. Estimate the number of events, vehicles, broadcasts, procedures, or incidents per year in your service area. Multiply by a realistic price-per-service. The number is almost always larger than current 5G slicing revenue. The gap between the two is the addressable opportunity.
Where to start
If you’re trying to figure out which sector to pursue first, start with the one where you already have enterprise relationships and where the operational gap in your current OSS is most visible. Live events is the most tractable for most operators — the service patterns are well-understood, the customer demand is real, and the SLA stakes are commercial rather than safety-critical.
From there, the operational capability you build to deliver live events translates directly to broadcast, then to connected vehicles, then to the higher-stakes sectors. The infrastructure investment compounds. The operational learning compounds. The customer relationships compound.
What doesn’t compound is waiting. Every quarter without slice-aware operations is a quarter where another platform — adjacent or otherwise — is having the customer conversation you should be having.
The full operational architecture
How slice-aware operations unlock ephemeral services across every sector.
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.