5G Advanced - How Will It Impact The RAN Market?
Dell'Oro Group, Wednesday, February 7th, 2024
5G has come a long way since the Korean operators launched mobile 5G in early 2019. In the first five years, operators have invested around $0.4 T globally in 5G-related capex, deploying 20 M+ macro and small cell radios.
Even so, the results are mixed. From a RAN investment and coverage perspective, 5G has accelerated at a much faster pace than previous mobile technologies. Preliminary findings suggest that 5G already covers around 45% of the global population, according to Ericsson's Mobility Report.
To put things into perspective, LTE reached the same milestone in early 2016. In addition to the reduced gap between the advanced and less advanced markets, the capacity boost realized with the upper mid-band taken together with the proliferation of Massive MIMO is providing a step function reduction in data delivery costs.
The SK Telecom 5G/6G white paper focusing on 5G lessons points to a 70% reduction in cost-per-bit relative to LTE. At the same time, 5G has so far been mostly about improving the economics and increasing the data buckets for the existing use cases. However, 5G has so far had limited success in expanding the use cases and reversing the carrier revenue trajectory.