5G Market Landscape - Forecast(2024 - 2030)

The global market for 5G is forecast to reach $64.2 billion by 2026, growing at CAGR 65.0% from 2021 to 2026. The market growth is mainly driven by factors including growing demand for enhanced mobile broadband services along with virtual networking architecture in telecom industry, growing investment in development of 5G and machine-to-machine communication solutions. Apart from that, rising adoption of IoT and growing requirement for better digital ecosystem will accelerate the growth of the 5G industry. In addition, demand for high-speed connections, greater reliability and access to real time information also contribute towards the market growth. In addition, 5G supports Virtual Networking Architecture (NFV) as well as Distributed Network Function Virtualization’s (D-NFV), which is specifically designed to reduce the requirement of dedicated hardware. NFV also offers location, implementational as well as cost benefits to the network providers, which plays a major role in the growth of 5G market size. Hence, these factors are set to boost the market growth for 5G Market during the forecast period 2021-2026.

The report: “5G Market– Forecast (2021-2026)”, by IndustryARC covers an in-depth analysis of the following segments of the 5G Market.

By communication infrastructure: Small cell, macro cell, Radio Access Network (RAN) and others.

By network infrastructure: Standalone and non-standalone.

By Core Network Technology: Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Distributed Network Function Virtualization (D-NFV) and Others.

By Bandwidth Range: below 1GHz, 1GHz-6GHZand mmWave.

By End-user industry: Residential, Commercial, Industrial and others (government and public sectors, defence and others)

By Geography: North America (U.S, Canada, Mexico), Europe(Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Others), APAC(Japan, China, India, Australia, South Korea and Others), South America (Brazil, Argentina and others) and ROW (Middle East and Africa)

By Network Infrastructure, this market is segmented into Standalone and non-standalone network infrastructure. Non-standalone (NSA) held the highest market share of 100% in 2020, attributed to the early rollout of NSA technology across the world and the lack of standalone implementation. Apart from that, NSA is analysed to witness significant growth during the forecast period 2021-2026. The deployment of Non-standalone solution focuses on enhanced mobile broadband services to fulfil the demand of high data-bandwidth and reliable network connectivity. Furthermore, NSA technology of 5G partially relies on existing 4G LTE infrastructure, which in turn creates an opportunity for the service providers, who could offer the customers their 5G services with NSA, even before developing the SA technology. Besides this, rapid digitalization coupled with growing adoption of IoT and cost effectiveness of NSA technology compared to SA has created a massive demand for faster data speed across the industry verticals, which is anticipated to boost the growth of Non-standalone segment during the forecast period 2021-2026.

Based on end-user industry, 5G market is segmented into Residential, Commercial, Industrialand others (government and public sectors, defence and others). The market for industrial sector is estimated to witness the highest market growth with a CAGR of 73.1%, during the forecast period 2021-2026. Growing demand for better M2M communication solutions along with increasing penetration of IoT across industries is one of the major factors fuelling this growth. In October 2020, The ETSI announced the launch of a new version of DECT which supports massive machine type communication system and can be used in building automation, asset tracking, industry 4.0, condition monitoring and others. However, after the industrial sector, Commercial sector is set to witness significant amount of growth during 2021-2026. Especially, due to the out-break of COVID-19, the demand for healthcare services such as tele-medicine, remote patient monitoring, m-health and others, digital educational services, retail and e-commerce services and others is rising, resulting in high demand of better mobile broadband services, ultimately affecting the growth of 5G market positively during the forecast period. In May 2020, Stasis, Bangalore based Start-up company, had launched a cutting edge patient monitoring system that helps in managing the increased demand for wards by setting up isolation wards at the peak of covid-19. According to Ericsson Mobility report published in November 2020, India is estimated to have 350 million 5G subscriptions by 2026, which will represent 27% of the total mobile connections in the country. 

APAC region is estimated to witness the fastest market growth with a CAGR of 67.5%, during the forecast period 2021-2026.Many Asian countries including China, Japan and India are investing heavily for the development of 5g network infrastructure. In December 2020, NEC Corporation set up an OpenRAN lab in India to accelerate the development of 5g ecosystem. In addition, to meet the customers growing requirement of high speed mobile broadband services, mobile carrier organizations are investing heavily. For instance, SoftBank, a Japanese multinational company, is going to deploy 11,210 5g base stations by the year 2023 across the country. Similarly, in October 2020, Jio and Qualcomm announced that, together these two companies will develop 5g solutions to fast track the roll out of 5g network infrastructure and services across India. Furthermore, the investment from the major market players of this region along with the on-going research work for the technical innovations, is poised to create tremendous growth opportunities for 5G Market in this region during the period 2021 to 2026.

With growing penetration of IoT in various sectors, the adoption of machine-to-machine communication is rising, to connect smart devices such as smart cars, machines, sensors, meters, consumer electronics and others, and to offer better digital ecosystem. In June 2020, Qualcomm Technology, JLC infrastructure collaborated with IGNITE cities to develop a suite of smart and connected technology solution, in order to fulfil the demands of customers in various sectors such as industrial, commercial, municipal as well as residential and to work as accelerator for smart city projects. According to recent studies conducted by IndustryARC, the estimated number the connected devices surpassed 30 billion across the world in 2020. Apart from that, increasing investment towards digitalization and growing requirement for high-speed communication solutions to get real-time data for M2M communication as well as analysis will boost the market growth during 2021-2026.

The investment in 5G and its adoption are estimated to grow rapidly due to the growing demand for high-speed broadband, virtual networking architecture and its ability to offer enhanced capacity, better network coverage and connectivity, greater data transmission speed compared to other network solutions. In April 2019, Japanese Government approved the plans of four mobile carriers NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, SoftBank and Rakuten to build 5g wireless networks with $14.4 billion investment over the next five years. In October 2019, North American company Qualcomm launched a $200M fund to invest in companies developing 5G ecosystem. According to recent research conducted by IndustryARC, mobile network operators are estimated to invest more than $1.6 trillion globally during the forecast period 2021-2026, for the development of 5g technology. Increasing investment in 5Gs and the wide adoption of 5g are some of the major growth drivers for this market.

5g networks can operate on wide range of frequencies, nearly up to 300GHz and these bands can offer ultra-fast speed, nearly 20 times more than LTE networks. However, availability and high cost of these spectrums create challenges in the path of the growth of this market. In 2020, mmWave spectrum auction was held in the US, which netted $4.47 billion. It was the largest spectrum auction in the US history. Apart from that, high capital investment also creates hurdles for the growth of this market, especially South American and Middle East region suffers due to the lack of capital investment. These challenges are poised to impede the 5G market growth during the forecast period 2021-2026.

Partnerships and acquisitions along with product launches are the key strategies adopted by the players in the 5G Market. As of 2020, the market for 5G Market is consolidated with the top players including Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Nokia Corporation, ZTE Corporation, NEC Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson,SK Telecom, Airspan Networks, among others.