Private RAN revenues continue to grow amid vendor push

And that's hardly surprising, given the noise we have been hearing from the vendor community on private networking of late.

Dell'Oro did not exactly provide new figures for the private wireless radio access network space on Tuesday, but it did disclose that growth slowed slightly in the second quarter compared with the same period last year, when we were looking at an increase of around 40%.

Use of the word "slightly" suggests we're still well into double figures. Further, the analyst firm also described it as "tapering" in line with expectations and noted that the private wireless market is still performing significantly better than those for public RAN and enterprise WLAN. It's all relative, of course; the private wireless market remains much smaller.

Dell'Oro predicts that we will see private wireless RAN revenues grow at a 21% CAGR over the next five years, a period in which public RAN revenues are projected to decline at a 3% CAGR.

Those forecasts haven't changed materially, it says. And neither have its vendor rankings. For the first half of 2024 the top three private wireless RAN suppliers globally were Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson, presumably in that order. Taking China out of the equation means Huawei drops off the list and we are left with Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung.

And the vendors really seem to be pushing this space at the moment.

Ericsson last week shared details of its enterprise 5G strategy, formulated in the wake of its 2020 Cradlepoint acquisition, with private 5G and neutral host solutions front and centre.

"Ericsson's strategic and comprehensive approach to evolving its private networking portfolio is addressing the growing demand for secure, high-performance connectivity in enterprises," the vendor quoted Pablo Tomasi, Principal Analyst for Private Networks and Enterprise 5G at Omdia, as saying in its strategy announcement.

"Ericsson's ability to meet customers where they are in their 5G journey with a unified experience will be critical in helping the market scale and enabling enterprises leveraging 5G to transform in a meaningful way," Tomasi said.

Clearly Ericsson sees the potential in this market. And equally as clearly, it wants to provide stronger competition for arch-rival Nokia in the sector.

Nokia has made myriad private networking deal announcements in the past couple of years and recently revealed the results of a market study it commissioned that paints the sector in a very positive light. Early adopters have been scaling up deployments, adding new locations for example, and the vast majority of those surveyed – 93%, to be exact – claimed to have generated a return on investment within a year; almost a quarter did so in just one month.

That's a strong message and one designed to help drive the market forwards.

And it certainly is growing, if Dell'Oro's figures are anything to go by.

"With public MBB investments slowing, the expectations with new growth opportunities such as Fixed Wireless Access and private wireless are rising," said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell'Oro Group.

"The results in the quarter and the trends over the past year validate this message that we have communicated now for some time, namely that the enterprise is a very large and mostly untapped opportunity," he said.

The big vendors are plainly seeking to capitalise on exactly that opportunity.