5G RAN’s growth won’t offset falling LTE investments
According to forecast by Dell’Oro Group, the RAN market’s expansion is over until investment cycles for 6G begin. After the 40% to 50% growth from 2017 to 2021, RAN revenues levelled off last year, continued to do so into 1Q of this year.
Further, the analyst house is projecting global RAN markets to decline at 1% CAGR over the next five years to 2028, although regions less advanced with 5G roll-outs will fare better.
LTE is still handling most mobile data traffic, but RAN investment mostly in 5G, which in the worst case is expected to grow another 20% to 30% by 2027. This will not offset steep declines in LTE’s RAN.
mmWave is only expected to account for a low single-digit share of the RAN market and there is increasing skepticism about the mobile broadband business case. Even so, Dell‘Oro says it has not changed its view that mmWave spectrum will play a pivotal role in capacity long term.
No big trigger
Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group, comments, “Even if it is early days in the broader 5G journey, the challenge now is the comparisons are becoming more challenging in the more mature 5G markets and the upside with the slower-to-adopt 5G regions is not enough to extend the growth streak
“Meanwhile, growth from new revenue streams including Fixed Wireless Access and enterprise LTE/5G is not ramping fast enough to change the trajectory. With 5G-Advanced not expected to trigger a new capex cycle, the question now is no longer whether RAN will grow. The question now is, rather, how much will the RAN market decline before 6G comes along?”
Earlier this week Dell’Oro reduced its forecast for the third time regarding growth in the mobile core network market.