RAN Market Still a Disaster, According to Dell’Oro Group

According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, preliminary findings reveal that the Radio Access Network (RAN) market is still struggling after the peak in 2022. The results in the first quarter were exceptionally weak, underpinned by poor results across most suppliers. Preliminary findings suggest that the overall 2G-5G RAN market—including baseband plus radio hardware and software, excluding services—declined 15 to 30 percent in 1Q24, resulting in a third consecutive quarter of double-digit contractions.

“It’s difficult to find a silver lining in the first quarter,” said Stefan Pongratz, vice president and analyst at the Dell’Oro Group. “We’ve been monitoring the RAN market since the year 2000, and the contraction experienced in the first quarter marked the steepest decline in our entire history of covering this market. In addition to the known coverage related challenges that the market is dealing with when comps in the advanced 5G markets are becoming more challenging, there are now serious concerns about the timing of the capacity upgrades given current network utilization levels and data traffic growth rates,” continued Pongratz.