Private mobile network market to grow tenfold to USD22 billion by 2030, driven by AI-powered automation

• Global revenue from private mobile networks is forecast to grow from USD2.3 billion in 2025 to USD22 billion in 2030 — a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58%.
• Applications will overtake network infrastructure as the largest source of value, rising from 15% of the market in 2025 to 25% (USD5.5 billion) by 2030.
• Manufacturing will remain by far the largest industry vertical in 2030, followed by logistics, the fastest-growing vertical at an 86% CAGR, both powered by the rise of AI automation.

LONDON – 5 August 2026 – The total addressable market for private mobile networks is forecast to grow from USD2.3 billion in 2025 to USD22 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 58%, according to the latest market forecast from STL Partners, a leading telecoms and technology research and consulting company.

“Private networks remain a fast-growing market, but growth alone will not make success straightforward for the vendors and telcos operating in it,” said Rosalind Craven, Principal Analyst at STL Partners. “Enterprises are not buying networks for their own sake; they are solving specific business problems and chasing measurable outcomes. Private networks can support many of those goals, but success hinges on communicating that value clearly and winning budget priority against competing investments.”

This third annual release of STL Partners’ private network market forecast sizes demand across 15 industry verticals, seven use case groups, nine value chain components and 33 countries. STL Partners estimates that more than 4,000 private network sites had been deployed globally by the end of 2025, up from 2,800 a year earlier, rising to over 40,000 sites by 2030.

Value moves up the stack

The application layer is both the largest prize in the value chain and the fastest growing, climbing from 15% of total addressable revenue in 2025 to 25%  (USD5.5 billion) by 2030. Software captures a similar share as enterprises will pay more for the intelligence running the network than for the equipment underneath it.

Hardware and devices tell the opposite story: their combined share falls from 39% of the market to 31% in 2030, even as revenue grows to USD6.8 billion, a sign that equipment is becoming cheaper and more commoditised. Taken together, network infrastructure and integration and support will see their collective revenue share shrink from 78% to 67% over the period, despite growing strongly in absolute terms.

“Enterprises increasingly treat the network and its underlying compute as a given and direct their spend instead toward the applications and platforms that turn that infrastructure into a business outcome,” added Craven. “That does not make connectivity unimportant — it makes it table stakes. The commercial question for providers is which layers of the value chain they can credibly capture, and adjacent layers are not capturable without the delivery capacity, vertical knowledge and customer relationships that go with them.”

Manufacturing leads, logistics closes in

Manufacturing is by far the largest vertical and holds that position throughout the forecast period, growing at a 59% CAGR on the back of AI-driven automation and Industry 4.0 use cases. But logistics will overtake extractive industries by 2030, while utilities and construction will move ahead of transport.

Logistics is the fastest-growing vertical at an 86% CAGR, driven by persistent labour shortages and the resulting push into automation, followed by agriculture at 78%, growing from a low base, and utilities at 65%.

This release also breaks education out as a separate vertical for the first time, and adds 5G tactical bubbles as a new deployment type within defence.

“The temptation for private network providers is to chase every vertical and every use case,” concluded Craven. “In practice, growth comes from choosing a narrow position and building a repeatable practice around it — two or three verticals, a specific layer of the value chain, or a deployment pattern that recurs across sectors. And the route to the customer is increasingly through a partner: the systems integrators earning credibility in private networks are as much a channel as a competitor.”

Slicing is growing but not taking over

On-premises deployments accounted for around 90% of revenue in 2025 and will still represent 74% of the market in 2030. Distributed deployments, most of which rely on network slicing, will grow considerably faster but from a small base.

Two factors are holding back distributed deployments: slow progress on 5G standalone, which slicing requires and which only 9% of operators globally had rolled out as of February 2026; and telcos’ caution in commercialising slicing capability. STL Partners noted at MWC 2026 that many vendors are ready to support telcos’ slicing plans but are not receiving the calls.

Learn more about STL Partners’ Private mobile networks forecast here.

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STL Partners is a leading research and consulting company that focuses on the telecom industry and adjacent markets by helping telcos and their partners innovate, grow and stay ahead of the competition.