What’s up with… Dell’Oro Group, Supermicro, GSMA

• Dell’Oro Group warns of 6G’s evolutionary trajectory
• Supermicro seeks $7bn for AI project delivery
• GSMA touts mobile impact on European economy

In today’s industry news roundup: Dell’Oro Group research warns 6G will be evolutionary, not revolutionary; Supermicro looks to raise $7bn to help deliver on AI deals; the GSMA highlights the impact mobile has on the EU economy but warns of a mobile access gender gap; and much more!

Will 6G revive the moribund radio access network (RAN) equipment sector? Not really, reckons research firm Dell’Oro Group, though it will require extensive investment and feature prominently in operator capital expenditure (capex) plans. The company expects 6G deployments to be evolutionary, building on massive MIMO deployments and the existing RAN site grid, while enabling “wider channel bandwidths to deliver step-change improvements in RAN economics,” it noted in this press release. And while RAN investment will be needed, it isn’t expected to reach the same scale as seen during 5G rollouts, according to Dell’Oro’s VP of RAN and telecom capex research, Stefan Pongratz. “Operators are in a much stronger position today from a network capacity perspective than they were during the transition from 4G to 5G. As a result, cumulative 6G RAN revenue during the first six years of the cycle is projected to be 10% to 20% lower than during the comparable period of the 5G cycle.” As a result, Pongratz expects the value of 6G RAN equipment sales to total $100bn during the first years of telco investments, an average of just $16.66bn per year, while cumulative wireless network capex investments covering all generations of technology and all related domains is expected to reach $500bn during that six-year period. “6G is not expected to expand the overall RAN market. Instead, the baseline scenario projects the broader RAN market to grow at a 1% CAGR between 2030 and 2034,” noted Dell’Oro. 

Still with the Dell’Oro calculator… the research firm reports that the value of the fixed broadband network equipment sector hit $4.4bn in the first quarter of this year, up by 2% year on year but down 8% from the very high fourth quarter of 2025.  

Dell’Oro also noted that following recent announcements about expanded AI infrastructure spending plans, the global datacentre capex outlook has been raised to more than $1tn for 2026.

AI and telco server vendor Super Micro Computer (Supermicro) is raising $7bn in equity funding, the proceeds of which will, in part, be used to help it deliver against a raft of AI infrastructure-related deals it has signed in just the past few weeks. The company, which works with a broad range of chip developer partners for the production of its dedicated compute infrastructure products, noted in this announcement that it will use some of the cash “to fund the purchase of components to satisfy the approximately $39bn of orders that the company has received in recent weeks for its advanced AI servers, including its Data Center Building Block Solutions, from more than 20 customers, that the company plans to fulfill in future quarters,” though it didn’t identify the customers involved. The vendor is one of the many beneficiaries of the relentless urge in AI infrastructure investments: In early May Supermicro announced fiscal third-quarter revenues of $10.2bn, an increase of almost 123% year on year.     

Europe’s mobile industry contributes more than €1.15tn to the EU economy, supporting over 2.4 million jobs but, due to incoming legislation, it is at a crossroads, warns a new report from the GSMA. In its Mobile Economy Europe 2026 report, the association found that Europe’s mobile sector directly accounts for 6.1% of the bloc’s entire GDP, which is up from 5.5% in 2024. In its analysis, it chalks this up to productivity gains, with mobile phone and application usage driving greater efficiency in accessing information. This number could top 1.6 trillion by 2030, the study predicts. But Europe still lags behind global leaders in terms of network quality, with 5G only accounting for 43% of mobile connections at the end of 2025. GSMA Intelligence research projects that more than €475bn will need to be invested in networks by 2035 for Europe to catch up – with just €270bn earmarked at this time. With Ireland set to take over the EU presidency next month, the GSMA called on the incoming administration to take a more “investment-friendly” approach to regulation.

Sticking with GSMA reports, the mobile industry body has also warned that women are being disproportionately left with no access to mobile internet in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs), although the gap is slowly narrowing. Women across LMICs are still 12% less likely to use mobile internet than men – down from 16% in 2020. This translates to 200 million fewer women than men, with the total figure for women not using mobile internet in LMICs sitting at 810 million, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap 2026 report. More than two-thirds of women not using mobile internet in LMICs are in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and the gap is significantly wider in rural regions. The gender gap in smartphone ownership in these countries is 13%, creating challenges for women looking to access the internet. The GSMA also found that affordability of handsets, and literacy and digital skills are the biggest barriers to adoption, while safety and security concerns and low connectivity also pose significant challenges in some markets. 

Telecom Italia (TIM) says it has finally received the €1bn licence fee refund from the Italian government that has been a long time coming. Only last year, the Italian telco confirmed it had prevailed in a 20-year-long legal wrangle related to payments made when the Italian telecom sector was liberalised in 1998. The telco didn’t say if it was going to throw a party now it has banked the cash… 

– The staff, TelecomTV