Ericsson won’t be drawn on Nokia’s retreat, but it’s happy to talk about its own momentum in the private 5G market: rising deployments, surging traffic, and sales that are outrunning the early years of Wi-Fi. Far from stalling, it suggests private 5G is scaling globally with clear ROI on business-critical use cases across industrial sectors.
In sum – what to know:
Long haul – Ericsson is playing the long game in private 5G, and notes the real story in the market is about accelerating demand for ‘business-critical’ industrial support.
Mostly 5G – Ninety-seven percent of Ericsson’s deployments are 5G-based; it dismisses industry share / counting measures as ‘dishonest’, pointing to growth in traffic and scale.
Versus Wi-Fi – Private 5G sales are faster than Wi-Fi sales, during its pre-iPhone salad days, driven by high-value, ROI-led industrial applications rather than consumer hype.
Note: Catch Ericsson and Levata tomorrow (December 10) for a webinar to discuss private 5G in the logistics and warehouse industry. Click here, or on the image below.
What does Ericsson think about Nokia? Well, it’s not going to say, is it – except to talk about the brilliance and bonhomie in the private 5G market right now. “We saw the announcements, like everybody – and the articles and the chatter. I don’t want to comment on Nokia, but I can say what we see in the market,” responds Manish Tiwari, head of enterprise 5G at the Swedish vendor. But he’s not about to tell a story about how easy it is, either; there is work to do, innovation to deliver, deals to be done. But there are good signs, and Ericsson is in for the long haul, it seems.
Unless you have been trapped under a heavy object for weeks, you will know about its Finnish rival’s reorganisation, which puts a twin focus on its legacy public 5G networks, sold to big carriers, plus some private 5G for large-scale (‘mission critical’) enterprises, and also on its new growth business in converged fibre and IP/optical infrastructure, geared to carry data-centre workloads in the new ‘AI supercycle’. Besides, the firm has put its ‘enterprise cloud edge’ unit, handling campus-sized private 5G sales, into a basket called ‘portfolio businesses’, teed-up for sale in 2026.
The move has sent shockwaves through the private 5G market – if that is not too-dramatic an assessment. You will make up your own mind, and there are plenty of Nokia apologists among the analyst set that have concluded private 5G is just too much of a slog for a big-box kit vendor like Nokia. Which might be right, but it also contradicts the work it has done – and it contradicts the work Ericsson, plus others, are doing. This is the story Tiwari tells – about a market that is in a better place than Wi-Fi was, seven years in – and which is also uniquely positioned in Industry 4.0.
He says: “Compared to the first seven years of Wi-Fi, private 5G is moving much faster.”
We should pause; because Tiwari is talking explicitly here about private 5G, and not private LTE/4G – which has been around much longer. Ericsson is delivering 5G almost exclusively. “What is important is that 97 percent of our deployments are 5G,” he says, in response to a question about how many networks it has installed. He also says: “Like others, we don’t share the total. Because people count [things] that are not honest: proofs or 4G deployments, or non-unique customers – four networks for one customer. I was in Wi-Fi for 20 years, and we never counted deployments.”
Make of that what you will. “It is a fake number,” he says, but he also suggests Ericsson has a “few hundred” under its belt. But the key, as above, is they are almost exclusively private 5G systems. “Many enterprises bought 4G networks back in 2010 – and they’re still getting counted. Whereas we are measuring 5G networks – of which 83 percent are pure 5G, and 14 percent are mixed 4G/5G,” he explains. He has another metric – just in case anyone wants to size and rank sales and shares in the market, and gauge some kind of preeminence in the vendor stable.
“The devices and traffic on these networks is increasing significantly. Our largest customers – taking a managed service, which we have visibility of – are carrying more than 40 terabytes of data per month. The other thing is scale: customers are scaling globally across every target vertical – which means all the core verticals, like manufacturing, mining, energy, oil and gas, transportation, logistics, plus some adjacent verticals like healthcare, commercial real estate, warehousing, and so on. So that is another good sign.” Some of these cases are public, and well known: aircraft manufacturer Airbus, mining company Newmont, sail championship SailGP.
There are plenty of others, some written about in these pages, and some undisclosed. But back to this Wi-Fi comparison, which Tiwari makes as a long-time veteran of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “In 2001, there were no iPhones, no iPads. Intel did not have a chipset that supported Wi-Fi; laptops were novel in the enterprise. A lot of the use cases were bespoke; very few enterprises had global deployments. A lot of them were based on this mobility case. Microsoft was the first, in 2005, to deploy Wi-Fi globally in a number of offices. And I mean, 5G has not been around that long, yet, and we are already seeing much bigger scale and much bigger investments from enterprises.”
Tiwari goes on: “Because the use cases tend to be very high-value, with a high cost of outage; they are business critical. Enterprises are able to get a very clear ROI. They are cost conscious, and smart; they need to see the business outcome to invest. And unlike the early days of Wi-Fi, this is not about showing off – just about a device that doesn’t need to connect to an ethernet cable. It is none of that; these are real business-impacting use cases.”
But, then, 2007/8, Wi-Fi had its iPhone moment. It’s a cliched killer-app kind of a question, but does private 5G need such a thing? It is a different technology and a different market, responds Tiwari.
To be continued…
Catch Ericsson and Levata tomorrow (December 10) for a webinar to discuss private 5G in the logistics and warehouse industry. Logistics 4.0 is revolutionizing global supply chains by connecting operations, accelerating process automation, empowering the mobile workforce, and securing on-site data. Private 4G/5G keeps busy warehouses and distribution centers productive, competitive, and resilient. Join Ericsson and Levata as they reveal insights from distribution-center executives ($100 million – $5 billion) on the must-have innovations for private 4G/5G rollouts. Click here, or on the image above.
