The telecom operators across the world, not just in India, are counting the revenues from enterprise operations to make a big impact with 5G. One of the biggest use cases that have been proven for enterprises with 5G is private networks. However, the revenues and shipments related to private wireless radio access networks (RAN) are coming in below expectations. Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell’ Oro Group, said that the potential market calculations are still the same, and private wireless is still a massive opportunity. “We still envision the enterprise and industrial play is a long game. This taken together with the fact that the standalone LTE/5G market is developing at a slower pace than previously expected, forms the basis for the near-term downgrade,” Pongratz added. This means that the kind of revenues that the telcos were expecting from private wireless LTE/5G services is not there right now. But there’s still a big opportunity for the telcos to capitalise with private 5G. However, it will only happen in the coming years and not any time soon. Thus, it would be interesting to see how much the telcos spend on the 5G spectrum and developing related/necessary infrastructure and how much money they spend on 4G, especially the telcos in the Indian market.
Indian Telcos Might Not be as Excited About 5G Now
India’s 5G spectrum auction is not too far away. The telcos are already worried about the loss of business use cases with 5G as the government has decided to allocate spectrum directly to the enterprises for private network services. Looking at the data from Dell’ Oro Group and this report, the enthusiasm of the telcos would go down even further with 5G. Consumer-related use cases are not too many currently, and Indian consumers are expected to stay with 4G services for the coming years. This might impact the amount of money that the Indian telcos are planning to spend on the 5G spectrum auction later this month.
