According to a newly published forecast report by Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, security, networks, and data center industries, the Mobile Core Network (MCN) market five-year cumulative revenue forecast is expected to decline 10 percent (2024-2028). The reduction in the forecast is caused by severe economic headwinds, primarily the high inflation rates, and the slow adoption of 5G Standalone (5G SA) networks by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

“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 at Dell’Oro Group. “This is the first five-year forecast out of the last five where the five-year CAGR (2023-2028) has fallen into negative territory. The count of 5G SA networks commercially deployed by MNOs remains the same as it was at the end of 2023, about 50 5G SA networks.

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“For the same reasons outlined for the MCN market, we reduced the five-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. The industry is addressing these concerns with several initiatives such as open gateway application programmable interfaces 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 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 added.

Additional highlights from the Mobile Core Network & Multi-Access Edge Computing 5-Year July 2024 Forecast Report:

  • The CAGR is negative for all product segments—Packet Core, Policy, Signaling, Subscriber Data Management, and IMS Core.
  • The CAGR for the market segments is positive for 5G MCN and MEC, and negative for 4G MCN and IMS Core.
  • The CAGR by regions is positive for Asia Pacific excl. China, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Worldwide excluding China. The regions with negative CAGRs are North America, CALA, China, and Worldwide excluding North America.