New forecasts say the private 5G market will grow at 34 percent annually to pass $6.6 billion by 2030; but the bigger story is how the sector has become a proving ground for the whole industry’s AI-era tech-go gambit – as a comms platform for digital change.
What a brilliant and complicated little market. There is a clear sense – for RCR, anyway – from reading a long list of private 5G triumphs, as periodically catalogued by SNS Telecom & Research, that this is the best version of telecoms out there. More than that, it is the sector, troubled as it is, that shows the rest of industry what it might be – and, indeed, what it wants to be: connectivity plus compute, connectivity plus control, connectivity plus security, connectivity plus AI – connectivity plus outcomes, ultimately.
A digital change platform for the industrial economy, in other words – where the industry’s best ideas (5G and 6G, open RAN and AI-RAN, agents and APIs, satellites and sensing) are put to work in flexible ways (private, hybrid, neutral-host) to connect clever tools (software, compute, analytics) in scattered infrastructure (edge to cloud; local and global) for crucial assets (workers, sensors, cameras, vehicles, machines, robots) to deliver critical gains (uptime, innovation, safety). It is telecoms in miniature – and telecoms as it talks about wanting to be.
The headline from the SNS report is not all that, actually – a finger-in-the-air forecast that the market for private 5G networks will pass $6.6 billion through 2029 (by 2030, effectively), on a compound annual growth curve (CAGR) of about 34 percent. (It doesn’t provide a 2025/26 start-figure.) Which represents good growth, clearly, and much better than in public 5G, for sure – a “substantial proportion” will be “led by highly localized 5G networks”, it says, “in enterprise campuses and industrial facilities”. Nokia, quitting the campus scene, might take note.
But equally, SNS talks (at length) about the rise of wider-area macro installments in the utilities, railways, defense, and public safety sectors – which, of course, aligns with Nokia’s new post-ECE attitude in the market. Equally, again: certain of these sectors will take a royal mix of micro-sized campus and more-portable backpack-style systems. Which further underlines what a chaotic market we are discussing – and probably also explains some of the reservations for a legacy big-box RAN shifter like Nokia. And that $6.6 billion is still a drop in the ocean, arguably.
To wit: Dell’Oro Group reckons the global RAN market alone (not including revenue from core network sales) will be worth $35 billion over the same time frame (2026-2030) – down from a peak-5G high of about $45 billion in 2022. It might be noted, the forecast now includes AI-RAN sales, pegged at the same – which means, at once, that AI-RAN won’t shift the needle in the (pre-6G) near-term, and that everything becomes ‘AI-RAN’. Besides, Dell’Oro suggests GPU-RAN, of the sort Nokia is pushing with Nvidia, will be worth only $1 billion of that total figure by 2030.
For its part, Dell’Oro says sales of private 5G (‘wireless’) RAN systems (just in campus set-ups) will grow at a compound rate of 10-20 percent in the period to 2030, and top $1 billion by the end of it – the same as GPU-RAN, then. So the RAN-plus private-5G sales forecast from SNS ($6.6 billion) might be argued over, but the CAGR outlook (34 percent) is solid – and way better than the flat-lining spend on public 5G. (Global telecom capex was flat in 2025, down in 2026, and is projected to bumble along at one percent through the rest of the decade, says Dell’Oro).
But we’re being side-tracked by big-sounding forecasts; the real take-away from the SNS catalogue is just that private 5G is a great place to be – if you’re in the business of making a difference, and of having an influence. And if telcos really want to join this ‘tech-co’ AI roadtrip – AI for networks, networks for AI; stacked digital platforms for souped-up industrial change – then this is the place to kick the tires, gun the engine, and hit the road. Because it is all here. Let us count the ways – as cribbed from the extended SNS report about the state of ‘things’ in private 5G.
If telecoms is searching for a future, then private 5G is probably the closest thing it has to a working prototype.
To be continued…
