The mobile core network market five-year cumulative revenue forecast is expected to decline by 10% between 2024 and 2028, according to a newly published forecast report by Dell’Oro Group. The report says the forecast reduction is caused by severe economic headwinds, primarily high inflation rates and the slow adoption of 5G standalone networks by mobile network operators.
“It bears repeating, this is the fifth consecutive time we have reduced the growth rate of the mobile core network market as the build-out of 5G standalone networks continue to wane compared to 5G non-standalone networks,” said Dave Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “This is the first five-year forecast out of the last five where the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) has fallen into negative territory. The count of 5G standalone networks commercially deployed by mobile network operators remains the same as it was at the end of 2023, about 50 5G standalone networks.”
Additional highlights from the Mobile Core Network & Multi-Access Edge Computing 5-Year July 2024 Forecast Report include:
- The CAGR is negative for all product segments, including packet core, policy, signalling, subscriber data management, and IMS core;
- The CAGR for the market segments is positive for 5G mobile core networks and multi-access edge computing and negative for 4G mobile core networks and IMS core; and
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The CAGR by regions is positive for Asia Pacific (excluding China), Europe, Middle East and Africa, and worldwide (also excluding China). The regions with negative CAGRs are North America, the Caribbean and Latin America, China, and worldwide, excluding North America.
“For the same reasons outlined for the mobile core network market, we reduced the five-year cumulative revenue forecast for the multi-access edge computing market, a sub-segment of the mobile core network market, by 18%,” said Bolan. “In the case of multi-access edge computing, the adoption rate is slowed much more dramatically than the overall mobile core network market. The industry is addressing these concerns with several initiatives, such as open gateway application programmable interfaces to attract the application development community to develop applications for the mobile industry that can easily be leveraged across all mobile network operators. Release 18 is introducing capabilities for new use cases and Reduced Capability RAN software to bring more 5G IoT devices to market. However, these will take time to bring solutions to market and, more importantly, at scale to have an impact on the overall market growth.”
