Digital Value Creation for Airport Operators
March 3, 2025 – Barcelona
By John Mack | Partner, Imagine Wireless
Here at the annual Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, the focus is always on wireless technologies and how they enable value creation in multiple contexts, spanning the commercial, public sector, and consumer domains. This year’s conference theme is “Converge. Connect. Create.”, which speaks to the convergence of telecommunications technologies with media and enterprise technologies.
The convergence of telecom, media, and tech (TMT) has been progressing at an increasingly rapid pace since 2000, fueled by major technology innovations such as the shift from analog to digital technologies, the advent of hyperscale distributed computing ecosystems, and exponential performance increases in semiconductors, as well as business model and product innovation that leverages the underlying and convergent technologies.
Despite TMT convergence the rapid pace of digital innovation, there is still substantial unrealized opportunity to generate profitable growth from digital technologies. Applying these technologies to business capability areas, operational processes, and market offerings (products, services) – an activity frequently called digital transformation – can generate significant and tangible value by:
- Improving existing business capabilities, operational processes, and market offerings
- Consolidating redundant processes
- Identifying and retiring obsolete processes
- Creating new business capabilities, operational processes, and market offerings, or even entirely new businesses
Over time, the macroeconomic value that digital transformation generates compounds, expanding the size of the aggregate opportunity. While “an ever larger pie” theoretically benefits everyone, the slices of that pie that represent specific industries differ in size and may even be static in terms of growth. The well-worn but still timely observation that author William Gibson made, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed,” is very applicable to the discussion of digital transformation across industries, insofar as some industries naturally lag others in terms of technology adoption, digital transformation, and capturing substantial value from digitization.
Digital Transformation for Airport Operators
Within the public sector market, the aviation segment is an example of an industry that has embraced digitization but still lags many other verticals in terms of the pace and breadth of digital transformation. Airports are complex environments, handling both commercial passengers and freight, and running their operations in adherence to strict regulatory mandates and high customer expectations around safety, security, and efficiency. While airports utilize multiple technologies to enable critical operational processes, they still rely extensively on manual effort to drive many processes. The abundance of manual processes represents a significant opportunity to improve performance, safety, cost efficiency, or other value-oriented variables by enhancing digitization. Additionally, the typical airport technology environment reflects a mix of diverse legacy systems, technical workarounds, and multiple solution vendors, creating complexity that inflates the airport’s cost structure.
In the case of connectivity technologies, airport operators’ past decisions around technology architecture and vendor selection may suboptimize cost efficiency, rendering some digitization use cases economically unviable. For example, if the airport operator has identified a use case that improves the efficiency of an operational process by applying artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies, the operator may find that the number of WiFi routers required to support that use case would be cost-prohibitive, as would be the ongoing operating expense for those routers, erasing any cost efficiency advantage.
Additionally, airport operators’ past decisions around technology architecture and vendor selection may also reduce the airport’s options for introducing new services that generate revenue. AI/ML-enabled use cases, which hold the potential to generate significant value and rely on high-bandwidth connectivity technologies, may not be economically viable even when the airport is using wireless wide-area network (WWAN) technologies such as 4G and 5G, if the airport procures those services under an expensive contract from a mobile network operator.
An airport operator can often benefit by reimagining their technology environment with a “digital first” vision and rearchitecting the environment to support high-bandwidth applications and high usage volumes. Optimizing the mix of connectivity technologies to support a diverse portfolio of use cases, with an emphasis on both cost efficiency and revenue generation, can dramatically and positively alter the airport’s trajectory of profitable growth.
The Role of Private Wireless Networks
Private wireless networks (PWN) can play an important role in enhancing profitable growth by optimizing connectivity costs while generating revenue. PWN enable use cases that were either not technically feasible or not economically viable to deliver with other connectivity technologies. By introducing a PWN into the connectivity stack, airport operators benefit from an accelerated and cost-efficient path to value creation through the digital transformation of airport operations and commercial activities.
The list of global airports that are exploring and introducing PWN to enable and accelerate their digital transformation efforts is already large and is rapidly growing larger. These transformational programs are typically multi-year, phased efforts that focus on automating and accelerating processes throughout the airport, as well as introducing new capabilities and market offerings for airport tenants, partners, and passengers. The net result is typically a portfolio of digitized activities, framed as use cases, that generate value in the form of capital expenditure efficiency (either lower expenditure or expenditure avoided entirely), reduced operating expense, revenue contributed (accelerated growth and/or net-new revenue), or a combination of these factors.
Although a wide-area network structured as a PWN is typically one of several connectivity technologies that airports employ simultaneously, it offers unique advantages in terms of capital efficiency and operating efficiency, since high-bandwidth antenna networks are cheaper to deploy and maintain than wired and wireless alternatives. Private ownership of the wireless network delivers additional cost efficiencies in comparison to contracting with a mobile network operator for such services. Additionally, PWN, which currently encompass both 4G and 5G technologies, offer bandwidth speeds and capacity that far surpass what WiFi networks can deliver, allowing airports to introduce and monetize services that were previously not possible to offer. Such services tend to involve vast quantities of data, often streaming in real time, such as those involving facial recognition, consumer profile information, or large-scale, distributed baggage tracking systems.
Conclusion
World-class airport operators are increasingly recognizing the profitable growth opportunity from digitally transforming their infrastructure, processes, and commercial activities. PWN can play a critical role in enabling that digitization as a foundational element in the network architecture, enabling and accelerating a cost-efficient path to value creation through both reimagined and new use case. By committing to that path, airports can more successfully fulfill their mission to operate safely, securely, and with fiscal responsibility to their stakeholders, all while continuously improving the customer experience.
To learn more, visit Imagine Wireless
Related content:
Digital Transformation 2.0: A Vision for Airport Operators (article)
Use Case Spotlight: Airport Perimeter Connectivity (InfoSheet)
About Imagine Wireless
Founded in 2017, Imagine Wireless is a professional services firm dedicated to optimizing the value creation opportunity for commercial enterprises and public sector entities through wireless network technologies.
We partner with our clients to shape, validate, enable, and evolve their strategic visions, technology capabilities, and business models to help them maximize tangible business value from wireless and enterprise technologies across their operations. Our services include strategic advisory, go-to-market advisory and enablement, technology advisory and enablement, program management, and vendor assessment.
Our team consists of seasoned professionals from the telecommunications, technology, and professional services industries. With a presence in major cities across the Western, Central, and Eastern United States, we can readily serve our domestic and international clients. Learn more at www.imaginewireless.com or contact us for more information.