The mobile industry has been camped out in the winter of 5G like it’s Valley Forge. Getting pretty hungry here and the old boots have holes in them. The end of 2023 was painful, and 2024 was worse.
During the past two weeks, Nokia and Ericsson both indicated signs of stability in their outlook for network equipment. That’s a relief for me, as their comments match my forecast for more stable sales in 2025 through 2029. Good to see that the deep freeze is not getting colder anymore.
“Stability” sounds simple. But the equipment shipped over the next four years will be anything but simple. With a lack of new spectrum in many markets, base station deployment will involve multi-band radios, consolidation of RUs, and FDD Massive MIMO. 5G-Advanced features will be rolling into the market with improvements to the uplink. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be used to boost capacity with existing RU hardware and new baseband processing.
When I look at the overall view of what’s happening, I would say that the hardware is getting more difficult and complex, while the software will become a product on its own merits. In fact, the overall revenue picture is shifting from hardware to software. I predict that by 2030, the first full year of 6G revenue in our forecast, software upgrades without any hardware component will make up more than 30% of RAN revenue.
That might sound pretty good to the Open RAN community. Not so fast. Open RAN DU/CU software will become a complete dead end, but tailored upgrades and SMO software (including Open RAN apps) will grow. Again, not simple.
Finally, FWA is rolling right along and it’s gobbling up capacity in the American mobile market. It’s time to start migrating those FWA subscribers onto the mm-wave bands.
Only the fittest will survive the winter of 5G.Darwin’s axiom is always true, but this ice age will select for intelligence, not size or raw power. The companies that can adapt to a software-centered environment with multi-band radio hardware will be here in the spring.
