5G Market Potential

Real-world rollouts have begun and interest is growing

Where are customers on their 5G journey? 66% said their customers were in initial or broad commercial deployment. Only 19% and 14% are, respectively, conducting trials or in planning.

What percentage of your sales are 5G-related today? 47% answered 51-75% bracket with 41% in the 26-50% bracket.

What percentage of sales will be 5G-related in 2027? Nearly 82% say 51% or higher. Only 2.2% said less than a quarter, while 16% said 26-50%.

Deployment models will edge to the cloud

When asked to rank their current priorities for three different markets, 43% rated upgrading mobile networks as their top priority. Nearly 30% identified private networks and 27.4% identified 5G infrastructure running on the cloud or edge as their primary priority (left chart).

For 2027, it flips. 40.3% expect their primary priority to be on cloud/edge while only 30.7% expect it to be mobile networks. Private networks dropped to 29%. (right chart).

2022

2027

Use cases are vibrant and varied

Where will 5G get used? Over 80% of the respondents rated four use cases – upgrading existing wireless networks, consumer IoT services, industrial IoT services, and fixed wireless broadband – at the very important end of the scale for demand in 2022 and 2027. Five percent or fewer rated them in the least important categories.

In 2022 (chart opposite), wireless ranked as the most important use case with 46.2% rating it as most important and garnering a weighted average of 4.27 out of 5…

Use cases are vibrant and varied (continued)

…while in 2027, industrial IoT ranks first with 47.3% giving it the highest marks and a 4.30 weighted average. Fixed wireless rose from fourth place to second in 2027.

Cost is the biggest potential challenge raised by potential customers, followed by concerns about implementation, a lack of new features of revenue opportunities and a lack of standards.