Update: ABI Research's 2025 forecasts for the 5G market can be read in our blog, Top Industries/Applications Driving 5G Market Growth from 2025 to 2030.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic putting a strain on capital expenditure (CAPEX) in many industries, 5G investments were largely spared, as countries like China and South Korea go all-in with 5G rollouts. In ABI Research’s latest 5G market forecast for the years 2022 to 2027, it’s clear that adoption is destined for rapid growth and will shift from a minuscule slice of the network market to the largest network by 2026. Moreover, market data from some other reports, such as a 5G Advanced whitepaper and the IoT Tracker: 5G report—add more credence to the notion that 5G is rapidly overtaking 4G/LTE. In this post, we take a closer look at the 5G market forecast with eight eye-opening stats that every service provider needs to know to plan for success.

There’s nothing more fascinating than uncovering the development of certain technologies and how these came to be in today’s form. Cellular standards are no stranger to politics, lobbying, intense competition, patent disputes, and many other commercial rivalries. The choice of technologies in The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is one of these contested domains, where companies compete to promote their own technology choices, giving them a significant competitive advantage when they have a strong patent portfolio in the area. Channel coding is one of those areas, where interesting developments took place with 5G.

Investors and shareholders are increasingly losing their patience with telcos, which have promised that their enterprise revenue will soon overtake their consumer business. At the same time, enterprise end users are not yet convinced that today’s 5G can address their pressing key pain points in line with the IMT-2020 vision most 5G suppliers are preaching.

written by ABI Research Senior Director Dimitris Mavrakis

The first article in this series discussed why telco operators need to reinvent themselves. In short, there are significant opportunities in both consumer and enterprise domains, but operators need to transform their platforms to address these new opportunities in an increasingly competitive environment. Despite the entry of hyperscalers in the telco domain, telco operators have the experience, physical assets, and technology expertise that no other entity has in the market. For example, current 5G cell sites are set up to transfer more than 200 Terabytes (TB) per day, a monumental feat considering any network, let alone wireless. In the fixed broadband space, connections transfer TB worth of data every day for consumers, especially if we consider 4K content and immersive applications. These require significant expertise that only telco operators possess.

The telco market is experiencing a tremendous amount of activity with fierce competition within the traditional mobile network market from new entrants, open networks, and hyperscaler services. Meanwhile, the boundaries of the reach of each company are blurring. Telco network operators are at the center of this competition, but ABI Research believes their position is ideal to let them become much more than they are today. They have the technology and platforms to do so, but have yet to capitalize on them. They also have long-time excellence in customer experience management and are very familiar with direct, personable, and high-value contact with end users.