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Sure, “7-Minute Abs” will get you ripped and shredded fast. And how about those Hot Pockets — a delicious medley of enriched flour, water, vegetable oil and various fillings, microwaved and ready in under two minutes! Alas, there’s no quickie solution for 5G terrestrial. Daryl Schoolar of Recon Analytics tells us why.

The analyst firm SNS Telecom & IT told Next TMT Networks on Monday that Ericsson will pass Nokia as a private network supplier by the close of 2026, 

This is because late last year Nokia’s CEO decided to sell its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) private networking unit and focus on the mission-critical side of the business, relying on partners and systems integrators to sell Nokia private RAN and core gear to enterprise campus customers.

Nokia will continue to focus on expensive multi-million-dollar, mission-critical private networking contracts, although there aren’t that many of those. While Ericsson, and many others, battle for the less expensive, but much more numerous, campus private network contracts.

As analysts including AvidThink’s Roy Chua have also predicted, this will start to alter the private network rankings, pushing Ericsson and other private network startups forward.

“By the end of this year, we expect Ericsson to move ahead of Nokia, although Nokia will remain one of the top three suppliers globally, largely due to mission-critical network sales for defense, public safety, railways, utilities and other critical sectors,” SNS’s 5G research director Asad Khan said.

Huawei will retain its leading position over both Ericsson and Nokia “due to the latter's dominance in China's well-established private 5G market,” he said.

“Nokia being in the process of selling ECE has affected the company’s PN position significantly in my opinion. And when looking at the private networks market (so not judging the wider companies’ activities), selling ECE after spending years moving in that industrial direction was not an ideal decision for someone who claims it is interested in private networks,” Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst, private networks at Omdia wrote.

“Huawei, ZTE and Ericsson are the top three vendors — for me the main difference between them is in the fact that both Huawei and ZTE have much larger enterprise assets that they can provide to the enterprise and or add to their PN portfolio, while Ericsson is a bit less developed in that regard,” Tomasi added.

So Omida and SNS Telecom and IT agree that Nokia has been knocked off its private networking perch, although they differ on which vendors will take their place.

Private network startup parade

Whatever vendors sit at the top of the tree, there are still plenty of opportunities for new and established players to break into market.

“The loss of Nokia's campus network sales will also benefit specialist private wireless vendors,” SNS’s Khan said. In fact, the firm finds that both established vendors, as well as startups, are making a move on the private network market.

“We're already seeing early signs of this, with the likes of Celona winning multi-site campus network projects for customers including Cargill, BP, LyondellBasell, Marathon Petroleum, Celanese and Google (data centers). Moso Networks, Airspan, Globalstar, Siemens, Druid Software, RADTONICS, Pente, Ataya, GuardStack/Blackned, Cumucore, AttoCore, Saviah, HPE, Cisco, Star Solutions, Benetel, Sercomm, Askey, HFR and several others are also seeing a progressively increasing number of private network deals,” Khan added.

The overall private network market continues to grow

Overall, private networking — both 4G LTE and 5G — is growing, according to the latest report from STL Partners. The firm expects it to be worth $22 billion by 2030, which represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58%, and an increase on the firm’s prediction in May's 2025 of $21 billion by the  start of the next decade. 

STL Partners calculates that more than 4,000 private network sites had been deployed globally through the end of 2025, up from 2,800 a year earlier. It expects this to rise to over 40,000 sites around the world by 2030. Most of these will be the smaller campus-type private network sites, rather than massive mission-critical projects.

STL Partners said that the “sweet spot” of private networking remains in the manufacturing, logistics and extractive industries (oil, gas etc.). It notes, however, that more verticals are aggressively digitizing, which includes sectors like defence, healthcare, first responders and emergency services among others.

Manufacturing remains by far the largest vertical and will retain that position through 2030, growing at a 59% CAGR as AI automation scenarios take hold. Logistics will overtake extractive industries by the start of the next decade, while utilities and construction will move ahead of transport.

Logistics is the fastest-growing vertical sector at an 86% CAGR, driven by continued labour shortages and the ensuing push into automation, followed by agriculture at 78% and utilities at 65%.

“New additions this year include adding education as a separate vertical (it was previously part of government and slightly underestimated as a result) and adding the new deployment type of 5G tactical bubbles,” STL noted.

Grand View Research offered a similar view of the market in its 2026 report, also finding that manufacturing is — and will remain — the top sector. “The global private 5G network market size was valued at $3.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow from USD 5.9 billion in 2026 to USD 150.7 billion by 2033, at a CAGR of 58.9% from 2026 to 2033,” the firm said. “The market in North America dominated with a revenue share of 32.0% in 2025.”

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Three of the major telecom infrastructure vendors, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, are lining up slightly different approaches to AI-RAN.

Much of this work now consists of the vendors linking up with forward-looking mobile network operators (MNOs) like NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom and T-Mobile US. Most of these early agreements, trials and tests won’t actually arrive commercially until the final days of 5G and the birth of 6G.

Daryl Schoolar, analyst at Recon Analytics, said that the majority of the work so far is around improving network efficiency using the AI-RAN. This keeps the work of the AI-RAN technology “within the 4 walls” of the network.

Ericsson was recently announced as the sole global vendor for the South Korean Hyper-AI Network Infrastructure Demonstration Project, which SK Telecom is working on.

The consortium will verify AI-RAN pilot network performance and physical AI service readiness across multiple industrial settings. The project is expected to cover network slicing, 5G standalone capabilities, AI-based network autonomy, service management and orchestration, distributed AI computing resources, and multiple physical AI use cases including patrol robots, autonomous transport, and humanoid low-power mode.

Schoolar noted that Ericsson is using Intel CPUs and its own custom silicon for most of its AI-RAN tasks, qlthough the company has worked with T-Mobile on AI-RAN software testing using Nvidia’s GPUs.

DoCoMo is working with Samsung on AI-RAN optimization technology. Moving forward, DoCoMo and Samsung said they will continue to advance this technology and explore future 6G use cases. 

Traditionally, all user devices (smartphones) connected to a single cell (base station) were subjected to the same network configurations. This approach often led to service quality degradation, such as connection drops in areas with weak signals. With the growing demand for high-quality video, online gaming, and video conferencing, users increasingly require stable, uninterrupted connectivity at all times.

This newly developed AI-RAN optimization technology works at the individual-user level rather than applying the same configuration across all users connected to a single cell. It automatically applies configurations tailored to real-time wireless conditions and the services being used, the firms said.

Samsung has worked heavily with Intel on virtualized and cloud RAN over the last decade and continued with some Intel AI-RAN moves. The vendor, however, has also done AI-RAN testing with Nvidia.

Nokia is the vendor most closely tied to Nvidia. That is because Nvidia invested $1 billion in the Finnish vendor at the end of October 2025.

Nokia defines the next era of radio with the industry's first AI-native RAN platform 

Nokia has said it will deliver AI-RAN commercially in 2027, following T-Mobile’s field trials in the fourth quarter of 2026. Other customers for Nokia’s AI-RAN will include SoftBank, Vodafone, Elisa and others. Nokia is targeting 100% spectral efficiency gains by 2028.

We will see if the field trials at the end of the year actually start to deliver on these claims. 

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Updated from our August 6 special report

Although we’ve talked about SpaceX’s femto frenzy last week, analysts and commentators are still chattering about the latest Elon Musk move. So let’s look at how Starlink Mobile’s small cell-powered terrestrial 5G network may — or may not — develop.

On the first ever SpaceX earnings call last week, company President and COO Gwynne Shotwell — aka the woman who somehow makes the crazy things coming out of Musk’s mouth seem vaguely plausible — said that Starlink won’t need to buy a big American mobile network operator, or sign an MVNO deal, in order to provide terrestrial 5G services to users in the states.

Shotwell laid out the unusual method in which Starlink plans enable an Earthbound 5G complement to its satellite direct-to-device (D2D) system, which the company expects will deliver terrestrial 5G coverage that’s able to penetrate buildings made with concrete and steel.

That is something D2D satellite service cannot do.

“There are many people who think that SpaceX can do D2D indoors but ‘Ye cannae change the law of physics.’” noted Real Wireless’ Paul Rhodes on LinkedIn.

SpaceX has now said  it will attempt to potentially fix this with a lot of tiny base stations on existing Starlink satellite dishes. Even though this was largely debunked by many analysts.

Starlink will deploy small “femtocells,” which will use spectrum SpaceX acquired from EchoStar, positioned on the roofs of houses — likely co-located with Starlink satellite dishes — to provide terrestrial cellular 5G.

“You could put a base station ... on the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish,” Shotwell said. “So you could have these little femtocells around the country and you deploy that as you need it.”

Chimed in Musk: “Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult-to-locate large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of small stations. They’re really just Starlink dishes that provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands and have them be all over the place.”

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Shotwell didn’t reveal the kind of money SpaceX expected to spend deploying this system. “You don’t have to necessarily spend many billions of dollars in low-band spectrum all up front before you deploy your system,” she said.

“The big three in the United States, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, are roughly a $600 billion a year market. I anticipate us being able to acquire quite a few of their customers, because I think our service will be better,” Shotwell claimed.

Musk claimed that the system would provide connectivity that is “probably better” than that from current cellular providers.

‘Elon Musk is nuts…’

Analysts we spoke to didn’t react well to the latest Starlink 5G revelation.

“Elon Musk is nuts if he thinks 5G small cells with Starlink backhaul can offer better (and cheaper) service than AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile,” wrote Dimitris Mavrakis of ABI Research on LinkedIn.

“Sure, if they deploy millions, then perhaps. But connecting them is not the biggest problem; getting power to them and finding the optimal location are the biggest problems. Let alone economics, ROI etc. Unless they are thinking of existing Starlink locations, which is not correlated with cellular coverage requirements,” Mavrakis added.

“Using femtocells tied to existing Starlink dishes can provide limited devices nearby with some coverage but it cannot compete with the Big 3 MNOs with scale and penetration,” said Roy Chua at AvidThink in a note to Next TMT Networks. “Realistically, they need macro cells to handle the throughput and density in urban areas (and likely suburban too) to credibly pull customers away from the Big 3.

Meanwhile, Daryl Schoolar, analyst at Recon Analytics, also suggested to us that the coverage range of any Starlink femtocell was unknown as yet. “Because of power output and everything else I can’t imagine its going to have great coverage,” he said.

An actual femtocell, which typically isn’t deployed outdoors anyway, usually has a maximum range of 100 feet. Larger small cells can offer a maximum range of between 1,000 feet to up to 1.2 miles at the extreme. 

The Starlink 5G signal boosters would have to be more in the femtocell range though, because larger outdoor small cells require the FCC to approve their use, which can take 60 to 90 days.

So, basically Starlink Mobile would likely need to roll out thousands — or more likely millions — of the femtocells up to get any kind of real 5G terrestrial coverage up in towns and cities.

Schoolar suggested on our latest podcast that SpaceX and Starlink Mobile will need to add low-band spectrum to the 65 MHz of AWS-4 and H-block spectrum it already acquired from EchoStar in order to make the small cell scheme work. Indeed, the Upper C-band auction in 2027 will likely be an interesting spectrum option for SpaceX.

An AI robotics future?

Some analysts and commentators, however, suggest that Musk and friends aren’t going after the traditional 5G wireless market at all with the femtocell buildout.

“He's not trying for today's smartphone business. He is going after the AI market,” suggested Mobile Expert’s Joe Madden on LinkedIn.

“In our recent report on ‘The Economics of Kinetic Tokens,’ Sebastian Barros and I illustrated a $250 billion market for physical AI inference, supporting outdoor robots,” Madden said. “This is ONLY for outdoor robots, not Gen-AI, not indoor manufacturing. So Elon Musk doesn't need smartphone subscribers to make money ... he wants to jump ahead of the  mobile operators and take the AI opportunity for kinetic tokens away from them.

“Why does he need terrestrial small cells?”  Madden asked. “These outdoor robots need to go through tunnels, or work in obstructed areas like construction sites.”

This will, of course, mean that the Starlink femtocells would need to be deployed on roofs close to construction and work sites in order to maintain reliable 5G connectivity and steady network latency to the robots, so likely separate from the backhaul that the Starlink satellite dishes could provide, which would be another problem. As we have already seen, robots need a steady and unobstructed signal in order to continue operating.