Written by Mary Lennighan
That's more than the Swedish equipment maker and font of industry knowledge predicted just a few short months ago. But while the headline numbers look good for 5G uptake in general, Ericsson is having to work hard to persuade us that 5G standalone is coming into its own.
The latest edition of Ericsson's Mobility Report opens with the assertion that "5G standalone brings new opportunities," which sounds promising, but there's nothing in the report that we haven't heard before. The vendor touches on the usual benefits of 5G SA: essentially, use cases that rely on
low latency, higher speeds, improved capacity and network slicing. But while it seeks to strike an optimistic note on the promise of 5G SA, its assertion that "more than 40 service providers have deployed or launched 5G SA in public networks," is a bit weak at best. To put that in context, around 280 service providers globally have launched commercial 5G services.
Ericsson's numbers gel with what we have seen elsewhere in the industry on 5G SA. Dell'Oro recently partly blamed weak 5G SA deployment for a sizeable dip in mobile core market growth, at the same time noting that there have been just seven 5G SA launches to date in 2023, while the GSA – which worked with Ericsson on the stats for its Mobility Report – shared data that also showed little growth in 5G SA this year.
