A new “forecast report” by analyst house Dell’Oro Group, says revenue from the sale of radio access network (RAN) equipment for private 4G (LTE) and 5G deployments in the global enterprise market grew by 24 percent in the second quarter of 2024. The result represents a “slight” slowdown compared to a year ago, when year-on-year growth in the quarter was around 40 percent (2023, versus 2022), but a “significant” advance on relative sales growth in the public RAN (cellular 4G and 5G etc, mostly for mobile broadband) and enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN; Wi-Fi) markets.
It suggested private 4G/5G RAN sales are performing “significantly better on a relative basis than both public RAN and enterprise WLAN,”, and also scaling more easily to commercial “larger, multi-site, and even multi-country” agreements. Both “expectations” and “opportunities” are rising in the private 4G/5G market, as they are in the fixed wireless access (FWA) sector, it said; the results confirm the global market for private 4G/5G is “very large and mostly untapped”, even if it remains a way off covering the shortfall from lower spending on public RAN equipment, it added.
In the first six months of 2024, Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson – in that order – topped the global market for private 4G and 5G RAN sales, it said. Excluding China, the top three RAN vendors were Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, also in order. It stated: “Vendor rankings did not change in the first half of 2024. The evolving scope of private wireless, [and] the fact that the $20 billion-plus enterprise RAN opportunity remains largely untapped, is spurring interest from a broad array of participants… Still, the traditional RAN suppliers are currently well-positioned in this initial phase.”
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It went on to say: “Contract activity is slowing but the quality of the contracts is improving and increasingly includes larger, multi-site, and even multi-country agreements. Regional activity is mostly stable. The three largest regions in the first half of the year from a revenue perspective include China, North America, and EMEA. Projections are mostly unchanged. Private wireless RAN revenues are projected to grow at a 21 percent CAGR over the next five years, while public RAN revenues are set to decline at a three percent CAGR over the same time period.”
Stefan Pongratz, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, commented: “With public mobile broadband (MBB) investments slowing, the expectations with new growth opportunities… are rising. The results in the quarter and the trends over the past year validate this message that… enterprise is a very large and mostly untapped opportunity. The market will continue to grow faster than both public RAN and enterprise WLAN, but because of the lower starting point, it will take some time before enterprise RAN revenues are large enough to stabilize public MBB swings.”