Ericsson revamped its push into the private 5G and enterprise space, including taking over the head branding of those efforts from its Cradlepoint subsidiary, moves that come as the overall private 5G and enterprise networking space stretch toward maturity.

Ericsson’s updates include new products and services that form an Enterprise 5G portfolio. These include private 5G networking products that can support licensed spectrum and a neutral host offering that is compatible with all the major U.S. cellular operators.

The more significant move is new corporate branding that will see the Ericsson name supersede Cradlepoint in the private 5G and enterprise space. This is highlighted by a pair of new wireless WAN routers that carry the “Ericsson Cradlepoint” name and can integrate with the newly named Ericsson NetCloud platform.

Matt Addicks, head of product marketing and strategy at Ericsson, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the vendor is taking a swift, but cautious approach with the branding change.

“There's a lot of brand equity on the Cradlepoint side of things and the NetCloud side of things as well, so we're not losing that completely,” Addicks said. “So you'll see things like NetCloud Manager will be called Ericsson NetCloud Manager, and it'll be Ericsson Cradlepoint. We're still keeping some of that consistency there just to make sure that our customers know that the brand is still there, and the people are still there and the support is still there that they can trust.”

Ericsson closed on its $1.1 billion purchase of Idaho-based Cradlepoint in late 2020. The move was targeted at boosting Ericsson’s presence in the enterprise networking market.

Cradlepoint has since launched several new products that have grown its presence in that market. This includes network-slicing ready SD-WAN and zero-trust network access products, and a more recent push around 5G-based secure access service edge (SASE) platforms.

Cradlepoint recently signed a deal with T-Mobile US to provide 5G-enabled routers and access to its NetCloud Manager platform for the carrier’s Connected Workplace managed service. That T-Mobile US service launched earlier this year with initial support from Cisco.

Private 5G, enterprise market demand curve Addicks explained that the new products, platforms, and branding move better positions Ericsson to provide an “end-to-end 5G networking and security stack across the enterprise LAN and WAN.”

“The platform of offerings will become stickier in the enterprise and allow Ericsson to better compete against other enterprise networking vendors and telco vendors that are that are out there today,” Addicks said.

Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm told investor’s during the vendor’s most recent earnings call that Ericsson’s Enterprise Wireless division did see increased sales during the quarter “with good customer demand for private cellular network solutions.”

That demand has been a long-time coming.

Manish Tiwari, head of private cellular networks at Ericsson, explained that the private network space gained momentum during the pandemic, boosted by financial incentives from the federal government targeted at maintaining remote connectivity for schools and universities. “But that trend died out pretty quickly once the federal funding got pulled away,” Tiwari added.

Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst for private networks at Omdia, recently told SDxCentral in an interview that the private 5G market is “growing and will continue to grow, but we are not going to see that hockey stick spike that some people like to see.”

Tomasi explained that some of that muted growth is due to the wide market potential, which has shown that not every potential market vertical will mature at the same rate.

“A lot of people in the telco world we’re expecting that every vertical would move at the speed of 5G,” Tomasi said. “If 5G has the development and the features and everything that happens in a few years, that’s going to be the speed that it’s going to take direct to the market. But the reality is that private 5G needs to adapt to the speed of the vertical market itself.”

An example of this is in the industrial enterprise space where Tomasi said “it can take at least 10 years to change the infrastructure.”

“You’re not going to change everything in a month because of private 5G,” Tomasi said. “You’re going to start testing the solution, you’re going to try and figure out how it works, how it integrates with everything and then if your replacement cycle is 10 years, that’s going to be the time you embrace private 5G.”

Tiwari agreed with this assessment, though he noted greater urgency as enterprises are starting to demand more robust private network platforms that can support more advanced use cases.

“Customers have tried to run [automated guided vehicles] on Wi-Fi networks for several years, and many customers realize that the cost of outages is too high. People were losing hundreds-of-thousands of dollars per minute, and so they transitioned to private 5G and those outages stopped,” Tiwari said. “That is a pretty consistent ROI that we see in many deployments.”

That return on investment could start working its way through the vendor ecosystem, which continues to be dominated by the usual 5G RAN suspects: Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung.

A new report from Dell’Oro Group found private radio access network (RAN)-related revenue growth slowed during the second quarter, though that was compared to a 40% increase witnessed during the second quarter of last year. However, the firm added that it expects private wireless RAN revenues to grow at a 21% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years as it becomes a $20 billion opportunity.

“The results in the quarter and the trends over the past year validate this message that we have communicated now for some time, namely that the enterprise is a very large and mostly untapped opportunity,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz wrote. “The market will continue to grow faster than both public RAN and enterprise WLAN, but because of the lower starting point, it will take some time before enterprise RAN revenues are large enough to stabilize public [mobile broadband] swings.”