Private network revenues will reach $64 billion by 2030, according to ABI Research.
Industrial manufacturing, energy production including mining, oil and gas, and logistics alone will generate private network revenues of $32.38 billion by 2030, representing half of the $64 billion.
Private networks, particularly for automating mission- or even life-critical use cases, require the highest possible network reliability and availability and are characterized by a high degree of network integrity to prevent data from leaving the enterprise premises.
“Enterprises that require network slicing capabilities to separate mission-critical from non-mission-critical use cases within the same physical network will turn to private networks,” Leo Gergs, research analyst for 5G Markets at ABI Research, said
Surge in private network demand
There is a rise in demand for automation and enterprise digitization. Enterprises in industrial manufacturing, logistics, and oil and gas are now accelerating their digitization plans to reduce their dependency on manual labor availability and increase the resilience of their business operations against sudden disruptions to supply chains.
The market for private network deployments will also benefit from a supply-side effect. The freeze of Release 16 gives enterprises the much-needed reassurance of 5G capabilities for enterprise-grade connectivity, which allows chipset and module manufacturers to grow the device ecosystem for compatible hardware.
While private network operators like Ambra, Citymesh or Edzcom are threatening traditional CSPs’ market share by monetizing managed services other than connectivity, hyperscalers like AWS, Google, IBM, and Google are launching their private network offerings in co-creation efforts with telco players.
Software companies like Athonet or Quortus benefit from trends toward network virtualization, which allows them to offer a virtualized core network either through System Integrators or to enterprises directly.
