MWC 2025, Barcelona | In the press room, late on the final day, trying to digest a bunch of briefings. Further coverage will follow, including (time permitting) about a Barcelona derby game between old rivals Nokia and Ericsson in the private 5G space – as a microcosm of this whole 5G event; an MWC in miniature, if you like. But here is a write-up and explanation of some (really!) interesting data points from the former about its progress in the market – which say customers are piling new traffic and applications onto their private networks at a decent rate.
The figures, showing compound annual growth (CAGR) for various measures over three years (2022 through 2024) are drawn from customer activity on Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) platform, which has spearheaded its charge in industrial campus environments (factories, ports, mines, and so on), notably. They do not cover network usage on its Modular Private Wireless (MPW) system, as deployed for utilities, cities, and suchlike. Nokia has deployed its DAC solution with 421 customers, it says – versus a total base (including MPW and other solutions) of around 850.
The point is, in order, that network usage is going the right way; the figures are promising. The average number of radio cells (eNodeBs) per private cellular network has jumped by 74 percent over three years to close to nine units. As well, the number of ‘edges’ (network cores) per deployment has increased by 42 percent to two systems – effectively meaning a geo-redundant setup for each DAC network for every site (on average), as per the mission-critical brief for Industry 4.0 engagements. Three years ago, the number was 1.4, says Nokia.
More surprising, probably, is the average throughput across its customer base: 620 GB per month, per network, growing at 57 percent over three years. As context, the average US household uses about the same (700 GB per month) on fixed and fixed-wireless broadband – and factories are not streaming films and football, and all the rest. Certainly, Nokia sounds pleased. “It’s pretty good, right? And it is growing, which means more use cases are going on these networks.” (Note, there are no CAGR start-numbers in the slides, but the CAGR calculation is reversible, of course.)
There is more detail, and surprise: the downlink / uplink ratio, which was always supposed to skew to the latter in industrial settings where data is harvested from machinery (rather than fed to a consumer), is 11.6:1 – meaning private 4G / 5G networks in warehouses, factories, and plants are mostly being used to consume data on enterprise-grade smartphones and tablets, and whatever industrial end-user devices are deployed. Is that a worry? “It is not a worry, but we were surprised.” So what is the explanation?
The busy downlink activity has various explanations: that the initial use cases have focused on worker connectivity, just to get data into the hands of staff; and that the flow of machine data going into edge servers on the uplink comprises smaller packets (except for camera streams, presumably), and is multiplied on the downlink for consumption by many workers, and other systems, potentially. Perhaps also, some on-device compute is filtering anomalies from larger volumes of data to limit the uplink traffic. All the same, uplink volumes are growing “much faster”, says Nokia.
It suggests a compound rate of 18 percent in the period; a comparative CAGR figure for average downlink traffic is not provided, and so we will take its word. Besides, Nokia says the average private 4G/5G network has 553 “things connected” – counting SIMs provisioned and active in various devices, covering phones, computers, routers, gateways, sensors, machines. “That is higher than we thought – probably by two or three times,” reflects Nokia. The sense is as well, of course, that gateways, in particular, will be offering 4G / 5G backhaul for many more industrial devices, like legacy sensors.
The number of SIMs / devices on its networks is growing at 30 percent per year, calculated over the period. Which means either more use cases, or just more usage; the average throughput per SIM is 1.1 GB per month, which has remained “stable” over the time, the company says – just as the total network throughput has jumped 57 percent, as above. The conclusion, broadly, is that applications and traffic are both spiralling upwards on private 4G / 5G networks.
For Nokia, the business is swift and expandable, it suggests. Seventy four percent of customers with one or several DAC networks have also taken its MXIE edge server-platform, which hosts the network core, plus an expanding stable of industrial applications. So, that’s 315 MXIE customers, to date – among 421 DAC customers, with an average of two DAC systems each. The MXIE setup is now sold with its DAC systems; older installations are also being upgraded, it says.
Revenues from applications are “still quite small”, compared to straight private network sales, but there is “good upsell potential” – from industrial devices on the side, and industrial apps on top. “We are moving up the value chain,” the company says, as if to gesture to the slide, and say; ‘here’s the proof’. Indeed, on the second score, Nokia claims it has more than 50 apps and add-ons available through the MXIE platform. Thirty three are embedded onto the platform, and a further 22 vendor offerings are available through its marketplace app.
Of these at least 14 are Nokia-made services, on the system from the start; to its credit and pride, these also occupy the top spots in its MXIE sales charts: Team Comms (as it says on the tin) is top, Network Digital Twin (for network monitoring and triage based on device performance) is second, and HAIP (for high-accuracy indoor BLE positioning) is third. Then come third-party apps related to machine data and security. All the third-party apps are tested and certified by Nokia.
The MXIE stats suggests Nokia is on to something for itself; the others say the wider private 4G / 5G market is getting busier, and delivering applications and traffic (and therefore value, one concludes).
