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What a roller coaster ride we’ve had for the past two years. Just as 5G was coming to market, a global pandemic locked everyone in. Video conferencing suddenly changed, from a novelty to a series of meetings ALL DAY LONG. For all of us in the communications business, that’s just dandy. We like video conferencing because it’s driving growth in our business nowadays.
At the same time, geopolitics have turned China upside down and taken 30% of the world market away from many American suppliers. The Chinese government was forced to stop deploying high-performance C-band base stations, and they’re deploying low-performance low-band base stations, simply because Huawei can’t buy advanced semiconductors.
And let’s not forget the other wacky trend in our society: The Great Resignation. A few years ago, I was worried that robots would take over jobs, and people would be left unemployed. Instead, we have the opposite: People are simply refusing to return to work, so we need the robots to deliver the packages and flip the burgers! We can’t bring in Edge Computing and Private 5G fast enough for many enterprises.
So, what next? This is a difficult environment for a guy like me, who makes his living by forecasting the market.
To get a tighter grip on our forecast, we’ve taken a new step this year. We’ve taken all of the detailed individual forecasts in our portfolio (on Macro base stations, Small Cells, In-Building Wireless, Virtual RAN, etc) and created a new model of the total mobile infrastructure market.
We back-modeled the market from 2011 through 2021 to be sure that the model is airtight. And we cross-checked to make sure that our bottom-up revenue matches with the revenue reported by mobile infrastructure vendors, to within 5% in each region, every quarter, for 10 years. Whew!
So now I am ready to make solid predictions for 2022, based on accurate modeling.
Prediction No. 1: Capex in mobile networks will rise by 7% and RAN revenue will grow by 6% in 2022.
Prediction No. 2: China will surprise everyone with large numbers of low-band 5G base stations at 900 MHz and 1800 MHz, using massive MIMO in FDD bands. But they won’t deploy any C-band 5G or mmWave base stations in ’22.
Prediction No. 3: Deployment of Edge Computing data centers will rise by 65% in 2022, with a heavy lift from on-prem Edge Computing.
Prediction No. 4: Virtual RAN capacity deployment will grow by 60% over 2021, led by major operators in major markets.
Prediction No. 5: Private LTE and Private 5G will accelerate, with manufacturing applications coming out of nowhere to become one of the leading sources of private wireless revenue.
I would use the typical cliché phrase: Fasten your seat belts. But I know that you already have the seat belt securely fastened…you’ve been on the same roller coaster as me for the past two years. Instead, I’ll say that the best part is still ahead of us. So wave your hands in the air and enjoy the ride.
Joe Madden is principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets.
"Industry Voices" are opinion columns written by outside contributors—often industry experts or analysts—who are invited to the conversation by FierceWireless staff. They do not represent the opinions of FierceWireless.