Written by Mary Lennighan
The global mobile core network market has just turned in its lowest quarterly growth rate for almost six years, hit by a difficult political and economic climate, as well as by slow rollouts of standalone 5G networks.
So says Dell’Oro, which has not published actual market figures, but shared its view on growth patterns over the past few years. The third quarter of this year was the weakest in growth terms since the fourth quarter of 2017, the analyst firm said.
The data arguably comes as a bit of a shock, given that it follows a strong second quarter. Q2 showed the highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2021, the firm noted.
Funnily enough, with numbers like that, Dell’Oro described the mobile core network market as “erratic” and “on a roller coaster ride,” Q3 bringing a big dip.
For many people, the most fun part of a roller coaster is the big dip, but clearly that is not the case for telecoms equipment makers keen to flog their wares to the operator community. Incidentally, Huawei was the leading mobile core network vendor in Q3, followed by Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE, but again, Dell’Oro did not supply any actual figures to give us an idea of market shares.
“Many vendors state that the market is volatile, attributing this phenomenon to macroeconomic conditions such as the fear of higher inflation rates, unfavourable currency foreign exchange rates, and the geopolitical climate,” said Dave Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.
But there is another reason for this up-and-down growth pattern: 5G standalone. Essentially, telecoms operators have been much slower in rolling out standalone 5G networks than most people in the industry expected.
