SNS Telecom & IT tells us that they are permitted to disclose less than 30% of the enterprise customer names
AvidThink's Roy Chua notes that many enterprise customers have strict NDA clauses in their contracts with vendors
Recon's Daryl Schoolar said that even when network vendors announce deals, they may not reveal exactly how many networks they are creating for a client
Despite the large number of private network deals announced recently, we are still not getting the full picture on how the digital industrialization market is growing, Asad Khan SNS Telecom & IT 5G research director told Fierce Network.
“Although Ericsson has recently made more announcements than Nokia and other rivals, we believe the vendor share has not changed much as the vast majority of deployments are not publicly disclosed,” he told Fierce in a recent email. To give you an example, out of all Q1-Q4 2024 private network deployments reported to us by one of the largest vendors in 2024, we are only permitted to disclose the customer names and details of less than 30% of the total entries,” the analyst said.
“We estimate that Nokia and Ericsson collectively account for approximately 73% of the private LTE/5G market in North America and over 80% in Europe," Khan said.
SNS Telecom & IT did reveal that Tesla is using Ericsson for its private 5G network in May 2024. Neither Ericsson nor the notoriously press-averse Tesla have actually ever confirmed the deal.
The customer question
Daryl Schoolar, Recon Analytics analyst agreed that network vendors aren’t revealing customer names and details of all their public network deals.
“I do know their customer list is bigger than what they share publicly. I think this is especially true with government/military contracts and contracts with other sensitive industries like mining or energy,” the analyst told Fierce in an email.
“When a vendor announces a network win, you can’t be sure if it is one single network or multiple networks across multiple sites,” Scholar noted. “For example, Vendor A says it won a private network contract with Company B. That win can be for a single site or for multiple sites,” he said.
"As for revealing customer names, many enterprise customers do not want the vendors to mention their names and have strict NDA clauses in their contracts, especially if there are cybersecurity concerns (knowing what infrastructure is deployed at a company might make it easier to attack)," Roy Chua, principal at AvidThink said in an email. "In some cases, enterprises get steeper discounts or other benefits for being willing to be named. I would say yes, much fewer than 50% of customer names are disclosed especially for infrastructure products and even fewer for cybersecurity vendors."
Private network shares
Dell’Oro Group has said that Huawei is the largest private network vendor with its massive Chinese market. Nokia is said to be largest Western vendor, followed by Ericsson and then South Korea’s Samsung Networks. Nokia said that it had a total 850 private network customers during its latest earnings call.