Dell’Oro lowered the MEC market’s expectations by more than 20% for 2023
According to analysts at the Dell’Oro Group, the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) market has “failed to materialize.” As a result, the firm lowered the market’s expectations by more than 20% for 2023.
“The MEC market is not reaching the potential market as expected initially. Except for China, the big promise for MEC was addressing the needs of enterprises. Several factors are contributing to the slower uptake,” commented Dave Bolan, research director at Dell’Oro Group. Those factors, he said, include the increased emphasis on Standalone (SA) private networks( which has taken some of the spotlight from MEC) and a lack of applications with “well-defined” ROI, competition from hyperscale cloud, and the impending Wi-Fi 7 standard.
“We believe enterprises are evaluating all of these choices before moving forward with more aggressive MEC deployments,” Bolan said.
The Dell’Oro report also concluded that the China Mobile Core Network (MCN) market, which has had previous success, hit a steep decline in 1Q 2023, which the firm said brought down the global market. “The China market’s growth rate had a steep decline in 1Q 2023 as its build-out of 5G Standalone networks reached maturity and is projected to end 2023 with a negative growth rate, a first since we started tracking the China market revenues in 2018,” said Bolan. “However, the Worldwide market, excluding China, in 1Q 2023, got the year off to a good start with the highest growth rate since 4Q 2019. We expect positive growth rates throughout the year with continuing buildouts of 5G Standalone networks.”
In Q1 2023, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE emerged as the top MCN vendors, said Dell’Oro, and when excluding China, the top vendors were Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. Further, the firm reported that 43 Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have launched commercial 5G SA eMBB networks as of 1Q 2023.
