Nokia’s burgeoning private 5G platform has been added to the vendor’s lab-as-a-service allowing device vendors and enterprises to test interconnectivity on top of Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) and modular private wireless networks. The move comes as analysts and operators continue to downplay the adoption of private 5G platforms.

The Nokia labs allow other vendors and enterprises to test devices and network equipment across different use cases either within the actual Nokia lab or off site. They use a combination of standardized testing procedures and pre-tested validation services to accelerate the process.

The physical labs are located in the United States, Europe, South Korea, and Japan. Nokia is also extending its lab footprint to Bangalore, India.

“By providing a complete test environment on an opex basis, enterprises can eliminate much of the expense and worry about how their devices and applications will perform, not just in a theoretical network, but for their specific deployment and use cases,” Kitty Weldon, principal analyst at GlobalData, noted in a statement.

The inclusion also furthers Nokia’s backing of its private 5G aspirations.

Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark noted last year that the vendor had signed 30 customers to private wireless contracts during its third fiscal quarter.

“We are building the engagements we need with our partner network to really scale this business for the future,” he said. “All of these points are very important for our longer-term strategy as it’s critical that we build momentum in enterprise to deliver on our longer-term growth ambitions. From what I have seen so far, I’m confident this will remain our fastest-growing customer segment over time.”

The vendor had previously stated it ended 2021 with 420 private wireless customers.

Despite the push, analyst firms and operators have tempered market expectations.

Dell’Oro Group this week again slashed its forecasts, reflecting “weaker than expected progress with on-site deployments.”

“Even with revenues coming in below expectations, our long-term position remains unchanged – we still firmly believe that private wireless is a massive opportunity,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz wrote in the update. “At the same time, market opportunity is not the same as a forecast and given the current progress it will clearly take some time for the private wireless market to reach its full potential. In fact, our current forecast is for private wireless to reach roughly 10% of its potential by 2027.”

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg earlier this year lamented the slow uptake of private 5G services, which he partly attributed to network radio availability challenges that have in turn impacted service and deployment pricing options.

“We need certain radio base stations for private networks, different price ranges. We need modems for certain things. You need more than the handset and the macro sites that is now in there,” Vestberg said at Citi’s 2023 Communications, Media, and Entertainment Conference. “We would now have offerings for cheaper private 5G networks with certain suppliers and more high level, high quality. We didn’t have this optionality, and that’s why we’re now sort of seeing that we’re actually meeting the customer demands of building private 5G networks.”

Vestberg added that the carrier now has “the ecosystem for radios so we are fully committed. We strongly believe in private 5G networks, and that’s a revenue stream we don’t have today because we’re not into Wi-Fi networks and optimization of a manufacturing site. We’re not into that today.”

Rival AT&T noted similar challenges.

Rick Welday, EVP and GM for enterprise markets at AT&T Business, said the carrier was receiving “a lot of interest inbound to us from clients that are talking about what they’d like to do with mobile edge compute,” and that AT&T was preparing internal support for use cases.

“The biggest overall trend in the business segment is digital transformation,” Welday said. “As customers are moving off of more traditional MPLS, VPN-type of technologies into the cloud, that capability becomes more important for our customers. So we’re getting a lot of interest.”

However, he added that the private 5G space is taking longer to solidify. “They’re trying to better understand what we could do with our 5G network and where private might play a role,” Welday said.

This lack of understanding was echoed by Dell’Oro Group.

“5G awareness is improving but it will take some time for enterprises to fully understand the value of private LTE/5G,” the firm concluded. “Pricing also needs to evolve as the competitive landscape for turnkey solutions improve – some of the price points we see right now for three- and five-year leases run the risk of squelching penetration, especially in the mid-market Wi-Fi like segment.”