In sum – what you need to know
Private wireless surge – private wireless growth catches Dell’Oro by surprise, as private 4G/5G RAN sales jump by over 40% in 2024, reaching 3-5% of total RAN sales.
Top vendors and trends – Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson dominate, with Huawei leading in China and total wide-area sales, Nokia leading otherwise and in total in campus-area sales.
Outlook and potential – the market will grow at 15-20% per year by 2029, with Dell’Oro revising its forecast upwards, and double its share of total RAN sales.
Who do you trust of all the private wireless bean counters? Well, RCR likes Dell’Oro Group, among a few others, which has just issued a press notice to say the market for private wireless networks is healthy, even strong. A new ‘forecast’ from the firm reckons 2024 was a boom year, in fact. Revenues from radio access network (RAN) sales to enterprises for private usage with private spectrum were “stronger than expected”, it said, growing by more than 40 percent in the period.
In total, it calculates private 4G/5G RAN sales are worth about three-to-five percent of total RAN sales – which is niche, clearly, but escalating and grown-from-nothing in a few years. Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson are the top vendors, it confirmed – as if there is any doubt. The former is only selling outside of North America and Europe, reflecting quite how far along its Chinese home market, in particular, is with private 4G/5G deployments. Nokia and Ericsson lead in the ‘west’, in that order. Samsung follows from this trio in fourth place.
Stefan Pongratz, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, remarked: “Private wireless is currently one of the more exciting RAN segments, partly because of the more favorable growth trajectory compared to the broader RAN market. While it is still early in the private 5G journey, and it will take some time before enterprise spending will move the larger RAN needle, initial readings suggest private wireless moved above the noise in 2024, representing around three to five percent of total RAN.”
A new report is available here. Dell’Oro Group maintains that “the $20+ billion enterprise RAN opportunity remains largely untapped”. But other findings suggest the appetite from industrial sectors for private 4G/5G networks is bubbling up nicely, and are interesting besides. Wide-area private 4G/5G deployments increased at a faster rate than ‘campus’-area deployments in the period, the company said, reflecting momentum in the utilities and cities markets – notably in China.
Nokia is the leading supplier of campus-area private RAN systems, globally; Huawei is the leading wide-area supplier. Dell’Oro Group said it has revised “slightly upward” its forecast to reflect the “higher starting point and the improved enterprise sentiment”. Sales of private 4G/5G RAN systems will grow at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 15 to 20 percent CAGR by 2029 – and double its share of the total RAN market to five to 10 percent in the period. Public RAN is expected to decline at a compound rate of one percent rate over the same period.
It said: “At the same time, the high-level message that we have communicated for some time has not changed – private wireless is a massive opportunity, but it will take some time for enterprises to embrace private cellular technologies.”
