A new report by analyst house ABI Research says the traditional telco community is restructuring its enterprise operations, including by establishing brand new business units, in order to deliver custom 5G networks for private industrial usage, and to make 2021 a “boon year” for “5G and edge networks”. Carriers AT&T, Telefonica, Verizon, and Vodafone and vendors Ericsson and Nokia have all reorganized for pitched battle in industrial markets, it noted.

In concert, hyper-scaler cloud providers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are stepping up efforts to provide edge-based storage and, importantly, compute solutions to run in enterprise venues and multi-access edge (MEC) infrastructure in operator networks. Besides, a whole ecosystem of service providers is jockeying for position. “All these players are investing significantly in edge locations, 5G infrastructure, and backbone networks,” it said.

The firm re-ran a forecast from a year ago that revenue from private 5G networks will grow from $1.6 billion in 2021 to $65 billion in 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent. The wider tech ecosystem is getting busy in the sector, it said, citing activity by “data centre companies, enterprise end-verticals, public cloud providers, and content delivery network providers”. All of these are looking to make money from the surge in private 5G. The report is available here.