The RAN equipment market suffered a second year of decline in 2023, but is expected to perk up all round after 2024
Dell’Oro Group predicts that the global market for RAN equipment will continue to fall in 2024 from its height of more than $40 billion 2022. Last year the value of the market dropped “sharply” and will shrink again in 2024, but less steeply, to over $35 billion, according to a blog by Stefan Pongratz, VP, Dell’Oro Group.
It seems that Open RAN shrank in 2023, but is expected to account for between 7% and 10% – that is, up to $3.5 billion – in 2024. Dell’Oro expects this to rise to between 20 and 30% of worldwide RAN revenues by 2028, according to a new report.
Commenting on the Open RAN report, Pongratz noted, “Current growth deceleration combined with the increased acceptance that Open RAN is not some kind of magic solution that will significantly alter barriers to entry or overall market concentration, is prompting more questions about the rationale behind Open RAN.
“The fundamental assumptions shaping the role Open RAN will play in this RAN journey have not changed. Over time, operators will incorporate more virtualization, intelligence, automation, and O-RAN into their RAN roadmaps. However, the business case for multi-vendor RAN is less compelling.”
There is other good news. Some relatively immature areas of RAN technologies will continue to grow, including for mmWave, massive MIMO, private mobile networks, small cells and virtualised RAN.
The analyst house does not expect the decline in the value of the RAN market to continue beyond this year.
The main cause for the fall is that most network operators completed substantial parts of their 5G RAN deployments between 2017 and 2022.