With early investment in the infrastructure driven by demand from mission-critical organisations, and with more spectrum being made available for enterprise uses, the inaugural forecast for the worldwide private LTE/5G infrastructure market from International Data Corporation (IDC) is predicting a boom for the dedicated architectures for enterprises until 2024.
IDC defines a private LTE/5G infrastructure as any 3GPP-based LTE and/or 5G network deployed for a specific enterprise/industrial customer that provides dedicated access. That definition includes networks that may utilise dedicated (licensed, unlicensed, or shared) spectrum, dedicated infrastructure, and private devices embedded with unique SIM identifiers.
IDC also sees private LTE/5G infrastructure as those carrying traffic native to a specific organisation, with no shared resources in use by any third-party entities.
Given this basis, the analyst calculates revenue attributable to the sales of private LTE/5G infrastructure will grow from $945m (£695m) in 2019 to an estimated $5.7bn (£4.2bn) in 2024 with