Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung headline the growing private radio access network (RAN) market that could hit up to $2 billion in sales by 2028, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.

The report states that those first three vendors dominated the worldwide private RAN space last year. Taking China out of those results removed Huawei from the top of the list, moved Nokia and Ericsson up one respective place, and installed Samsung as No. 3.

More importantly, Dell’Oro Group found the private RAN market surged 40% last year, which garnered it a 2% share of the overall RAN market. And it’s expected to grow at a 21% compound annual growth rate over the next five years to as much as $2 billion in total sales by 2028, compared to an expected 2% CAGR drop over the next five years for the public RAN market.

“Although public RAN is still fueling the lion’s share of the overall RAN capex and the overall investment levels are tracking below some of the initial projections provided by the vendors in the early part of the 5G enterprise hype cycle, the fact of the matter is that private wireless is now growing at a formidable pace,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz wrote. “This stands in contrast to public RAN and enterprise WLAN – both segments are projected to contract in 2024.”

Vendors also dominate the broader private network space.

Alex Davies, senior analyst at Rethink Research, explained during a post-MWC Barcelona 2024 podcast that from conversations he had during the event, a vast majority of current private network deals do not include an mobile network operator.

“The private opportunity, especially in things like industrial, manufacturing, and oil and gas, a lot of that stuff is viewed by the MNOs as an opportunity, but I think that’s a very entrenched customer base, which is not going to be super receptive to the likes of Telefonica, Vodafone, knocking on the door,” Davies said. “They’ve committed to a private network for a reason, and I think the sort of grizzled operations tech guy is not going to be swayed by declarations of the capabilities of a public 5G network.”

That sentiment was echoed by Chris Antlitz, principal analyst for telecom at TBR Insights, who during a post-MWC presentation said that “in many cases, we’re not seeing any telco in the value chain, not even for spectrum, depending on the country if there’s private spectrum available.”

“From a telco perspective, uptake is relatively slow for private networks,” Antlitz said. “But if you look from a vendor perspective, for example if you look at Nokia, if you look at what they’re making in revenue from private networks, they’re growing at a double-digit rate. They’re growing strongly and there’s other vendors as well that are growing at a very strong rate, like a Huawei and even Ericsson to an extent.”

Nokia has indeed been viewed as the leading light in the private network space. CEO Pekka Lundmark recently told investors as part of the vendor’s latest earnings call that private networks have “been consistently delivering double-digit growth.” Nokia said it ended 2023 with more than 710 private wireless customers and they represented more than one-fourth of its overall enterprise sales.

Antlitz noted that this level of success shows market opportunities abound, but MNOs are so far not a necessary part of that opportunity.

“If you look at those players, if you go directly to source, the infrastructure, the source of the application layer, the source of the services provided to implement, manage support those environments, those players are performing much better than how the telcos are and that’s an indicator of this disintermediation of the value chain that we see occurring for telcos,” Antlitz said.

“Just to be a little more succinct,” he added, “the vendors, the non-telco providers in the private network value chain, are outperforming where the operators are, and therefore if you look at it from a holistic standpoint, there actually is quite a bit of traction in the private networks market.”