Mobile Core Network Market Forecast to Decline 10%, Says Dell’Oro Group

The Dell’Oro Group said that the five-year cumulative revenue forecast for the Mobile Core Network (MCN) market is expected to decline ten percent over that period.

Attributed to the decline are economic factors and slow progress in the adoption of 5G Standalone networks.

“It bears repeating, this is the fifth consecutive time we have reduced the growth rate of the MCN market as the build-out of 5G SA networks continue to wane compared to 5G Non-standalone networks,” said Dave Bolan, research director.

“For the same reasons outlined for the MCN market, we reduced the 5-year cumulative revenue forecast for the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) market, a sub-segment of the MCN market, by 18 percent. In the case of MEC, the adoption rate is slowed much more dramatically than the overall MCN market,” Bolan said.

The road ahead

In a statement, Bolan highlighted potential solutions to address the decline, albeit cautiously.

“The industry is addressing these concerns with several initiatives such as open gateway application programmable interfaces (APIs) to attract the application development community to develop applications for the mobile industry that can easily be leveraged across all MNOs. Release 18 is introducing capabilities for new use cases, and Reduced Capability (RedCap) RAN software to bring more 5G IoT devices to market. However, these will take time to bring solutions to market and more importantly at scale to have an impact on the overall market growth,” Bolan remarked.

The report, called the Mobile Core Network & Multi-Access Edge Computing 5-Year July 2024 Forecast Report, highlighted additional points including negative CAGR for all product segments—Packet Core, Policy, Signaling, Subscriber Data Management, and IMS Core. CAGR is positive for 5G MCN and MEC, and negative for 4G MCN and IMS Core.