Dell’Oro Group continued a downbeat assessment of the immediate prospects for the global RAN market, predicting further woe for vendors until 6G becomes a reality.

The company predicted RAN revenue would trend downwards until 2029.

Although suggesting figures for 2024 would represent a second consecutive year of steep decline, the pace of the drop is expected to slow over the remaining years ahead of 6G.

The short-term prospects for the RAN market have regularly been given a dour outlook by the company, a stance reflected by comments made this year by chiefs at Ericsson and Nokia.   

Dell’Oro Group anticipates spending on 6G will “approach” $30 billion by 2033. The technology is widely expected to be launched around 2030 by early adopters.

Alongside general market fluctuations, which Dell’Oro Group noted were historically common in the RAN market, it claimed “the over-promising of 5G and its inability to significantly alter the flat revenue trend among operators are fuelling increased scepticism regarding the need for substantial investments in new technologies”.

The company’s VP of RAN and telecom capex Stefan Pongratz said “operators will need to optimise their spectrum roadmaps to address various data traffic scenarios”.

“Our base case assumes that mobile data traffic growth will continue to slow, enabling operators to improve their capital intensity ratios, which will in turn put further downward pressure on the RAN market. However, additional capacity will eventually be required and at that point, leveraging larger spectrum bands and the existing macro grid will likely offer the most cost-effective solution.”