Public telco cloud held back by slow 5G SA progress

According to a report the migration of 5G workloads to the public cloud is taking longer than expected due to the lethargic pace at which the industry is rolling out 5G standalone (SA).

That’s the primary reason behind Dell’Oro’s decision to lower its growth forecast for revenues generated by 5G SA workloads hosted on public cloud.

The research firm expects cumulative revenue to reach $5.4 billion by 2027, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65%.

While that’s still impressive, it is considerably lower than its previous forecast. Last August, Dell’Oro predicted that cumulative revenues would show a CAGR of 88%  in the five years to 2026, hitting $4.6 billion.

“The forecast has been reduced due to the slow migration to 5G SA by mobile network operators (MNOs) for their eMMB (enhanced mobile broadband) networks and by enterprises for their 5G SA private wireless networks,” said Dell’Oro research director Dave Bolan, in a statement.

Indeed, just 36 operators had launched 5G SA by the end of the second quarter, according to figures published earlier this month by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA). That’s just one more launch since the end of Q1. In addition, the number of operators investing in 5G SA remained unchanged in the second quarter at 115.

Dish in the US is still flying the flag for telco public cloud, but instead of that being the first of many deployments, not many telcos seem to have followed suit.

And when it comes to private 5G SA networks, enterprises don’t seem to be in a rush either.

“Some enterprise networks are commercially deployed, but most are long-term proofs-of-concept (PoCs) or field trials, lasting as long as a few years,” Bolan noted.

“As a result, we forecast that HCPs (hyperscale cloud providers) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure will capture a cumulative 6% of the market revenues over the next five years by hosting 5G workloads on their respective public clouds,” he said.

Hyperscalers will also have to bide their time to crack the multi-access edge compute (MEC) market.

According to Dell’Oro, HCPs can expect to generate cumulative revenues of $1.3 billion from the MEC market over the next five years.

“The anticipated CAGR for the edge of the public cloud market is 86%, making it the highest growth segment for HCPs. The interest by the HCPs also extends to the IMS core and the virtualised radio access network (vRAN),” Bolan said.

Again, that is impressive growth, but $1.3 billion is a drop in the ocean compared to the broader MEC and mobile core network (MCN) market, which Dell’Oro predicted earlier this year would total $50 billion by 2027.

There is still a lot of potential for hyperscalers to tap in both the 5G SA and MEC markets, which is encouraging, but for now it looks as though they will continue to amount to little more than a rounding error on their balance sheets.

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