A global pandemic is crippling entire industries but the 5G market and its prospects will scrape by largely unscathed compared to other markets, according to ABI Research.

Capex spending on 5G network deployments will decline 10% globally this year, but those activities will pick up next year, or once the crisis is over, according to Dimitris Mavrakis, research director at ABI Research.

“The biggest factors contributing to this slowdown are actually personnel issues and human resources, not supply chain issues,” Mavrakis said during a webinar about the pandemic’s impact on various technologies. Most technicians and engineers can’t visit sites because of public health restrictions, but operators remain confident that 5G deployments will get underway again around June, he explained.

However, those timelines are very much a moving target. No one knows when social distancing guidelines will be eased and when business operations will get back to normal. Some public health professionals and political leaders in the United States this week warned that the restrictive measures in place today might continue for many months, and potentially even years.

ABI Research is making its predictions based on the assumption that the major effects of the crisis will be over by this summer. There is no consensus about when stay-at-home orders can or should be eased.

Traditional economic downturns like those experienced in 2000 and 2008 are the direct result of a domino effect driven by a lack of business confidence, which leads to job losses, significant declines in consumer spending, and a slowdown in demand, said Malik Saadi, VP of strategic technologies at ABI Research. A pandemic impacts all of those elements almost simultaneously, he said.

“The COVID-19 outbreak has taken the world by surprise and technology suppliers were largely unprepared to deal with it. As a result, business organizations are now navigating through the crisis with no clear visibility on what the future holds for them,” Saadi said. “During this crisis, several businesses and business organizations will be fighting for their survival rather than striving for prosperity.”

With most people quarantined at home, telecom networks have become even more important than before, and operators are coping with the increased demand without any major problems to date, Mavrakis said. Meanwhile, geopolitics, namely the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, remains a more important factor impacting the 5G supply chain, he added.

“The supply chain is robust so any operator that wants to deploy infrastructure today, they have all the equipment they need. The supply chain has redundancies,” Mavrakis said. However, the trade war is creating a rift between the Western and Chinese markets and causing separation, he explained.

With Huawei and ZTE banned in many Western countries, “the deployment share of 5G for Ericsson and Nokia in China is being reduced also, perhaps to counter their ban in Western markets,” he said.

Despite unprecedented levels of uncertainty, some areas of the wireless telecommunications market are accelerating, particularly open radio access network (RAN) technology and virtualization, according to Mavrakis. This is primarily being driven by operators’ desire for more choices in vendors, and that’s leading to new types of companies and network architecture.

The dominant RAN vendors — Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and ZTE — rely on specialized processing platforms and develop their own chipsets. “The whole movement with open RAN is to rely on generic processors and obviously this will take time to complete,” Mavrakis said.

“We see many operators and many vendors actually deploying and developing open RAN. This again has the capability to completely redefine the supply chain much more than both geopolitics and the effects of the virus,” he added. If one or two of the incumbent RAN vendors suffer for any reason, it could create a duopoly or monopoly in many countries and that’s a situation no operator wants to face.

“We see the coronavirus as a reason to accelerate the private sector and also open RAN,” Mavrakis said.

Mobile edge computing is another area experiencing increased growth and competition, he added. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are deploying edge servers in local markets, and following Microsoft’s Affirmed Networks acquisition, the only component missing in Microsoft’s edge product line is the private network capability, or the last mile, he said.

Edge computing coupled with open RAN should increase among enterprises relatively quickly, says Mavrakis. “We do expect over the course of the next two years the edge computing space, both dedicated and shared edge, will be a very contested topic, and certainly the effects of geopolitics and [COVID-19] will accelerate it.”

Overall, ABI Research doesn’t expect COVID to be a major negative influence. “Once this crisis is over, this experience will act as a great accelerator for digitization,” forcing companies to rethink how they operate and adopt more automation and intelligence to their business processes, Saadi said.

“The entire lockdown experience during COVID-19 will help consumers to see and appreciate the relevance of the digital lifestyle more than ever before,” he said. “It will also push businesses and enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation so they can improve on their operation efficiency, optimize opex and capex spending, and most importantly get ready for more potential future disruptions.”

Those efforts will result in greater adoption of emerging technologies such as 5G, open network infrastructures, private networks, edge computing, and artificial intelligence, Saadi concluded. As such, he encourages enterprises to “embrace diversification wherever and whenever they can.”