This week’s 5G news spans the full spectrum of the industry’s current preoccupations: Europe’s uncomfortable reckoning with its investment deficit, the accelerating commercialisation of network slicing, a flurry of sports connectivity milestones ahead of the FIFA World Cup, and the quiet but significant advance of AI-native network thinking. From Jio’s extraordinary scale in India to Deutsche Telekom’s architectural overhaul in the core, and from quantum-assisted RAN planning to Power Class 1 validation for FWA, the week underscores that the industry’s centre of gravity is shifting decisively from coverage to capability.
The GSMA delivered one of the week’s most significant pieces of analysis, quantifying the scale of Europe’s 5G investment shortfall with striking clarity. According to a new GSMA Intelligence report, Europe requires €475 billion in mobile network investment by 2035 to achieve best-in-class connectivity, yet only €270 billion is currently forecast to materialise, leaving a gap of roughly €205 billion. The figures land at a moment when Europe’s digital ambitions are increasingly difficult to reconcile with the commercial realities facing its operators.
While 5G Standalone (SA) already reaches 80% of the population in Greater China and approaching 50% in India, it covers just 2% of European citizens. Capital expenditure per connection in Europe stands at €35, less than half the €70 recorded in leading global markets. Meanwhile, operator revenues have declined by an average of 3% per year since 2018, even as mobile data usage has grown at 27% annually. Operators currently shoulder 85% of infrastructure investment themselves.
The GSMA points to three levers capable of closing the gap: in-market consolidation, more effective spectrum management (spectrum costs in Europe have nearly tripled in a decade, with more than 500 licences due for renewal by 2035), and a rebalancing of regulatory burdens across the digital ecosystem. The report is a timely input for the European Commission as it finalises the Digital Networks Act, which proposes indefinite spectrum licences as one mechanism for improving investment certainty. Without structural reform, Europe risks extending its role as a fast-follower in 5G rather than a leader.
BT confirmed this week that it plans to launch commercial 5G network slicing services before the end of summer 2026, making it one of the first UK operators to bring the capability to market at a national scale. The announcement was made alongside BT’s appointment as the official telecommunications partner for UEFA Euro 2028, which will be co-hosted by the UK and Ireland.
BT’s 5G SA network, branded as EE’s ‘5G+’, now covers 50 million people in the UK, a threshold BT’s Chief Security and Networks Officer Greg McCall described as sufficient breadth to support national slicing. The carrier defines 5G SA coverage in a town or city only when it reaches 90% of the local population, a notably cautious standard that strengthens the commercial credibility of the upcoming service. Target coverage is more than 60 million people by the time Euro 2028 begins, and 99% of the UK population by 2030.
The slicing offer will be available to both business and consumer customers, targeting use cases requiring resilience and low latency such as broadcast, live events, and applications sensitive to network jitter. BT has already trialled slicing at Wembley Stadium and during the SailGP championship in Portsmouth. For Euro 2028, the carrier will provision slices at each of 24 tournament training grounds, reserving priority capacity for players and coaching staff. BT’s move follows Vodafone Business, which last month claimed to be the first UK operator to offer 5G network slicing backed by a service level agreement.
Two major sporting stories this week highlighted how private 5G networks are becoming the connectivity infrastructure of choice for large-scale live events. Verizon, the official telecommunications services sponsor for the FIFA World Cup 2026, detailed its preparations for what it describes as an unprecedented data consumption challenge. The carrier has increased 5G capacity across all 16 stadiums in the US, Canada and Mexico by three to five times, deploying 140 small cells and temporary sites along with additional C-band and mmWave spectrum. With up to 50 terabytes of data anticipated per match, Verizon has also deployed private 5G networks to support the Lenovo Referee View bodycam system, which will provide real-time AI-stabilised referee-perspective footage for global broadcasts. Network slicing will support high-priority back-of-house FIFA operations across the venues.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile shed light on its relatively restrained mmWave strategy through coverage of its deployment at last weekend’s Kentucky Derby. Whilst T-Mobile’s commercial mmWave footprint is minimal in macro networks (appearing in just one market in RootMetrics testing during the second half of 2025, compared to Verizon’s 91), the operator uses it selectively for private network and event deployments. NBC Sports used T-Mobile’s 5G SA and mmWave capability via its NR-DC technology to capture broadcast footage at the Kentucky Derby, and the technology is already lined up for next week’s PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club. The comparison between T-Mobile’s targeted approach and Verizon’s more extensive macro mmWave deployment reflects a continuing strategic divergence between the two US carriers on spectrum philosophy.
Deutsche Telekom’s quiet but consequential shift in 5G core network strategy came into focus this week following the FutureNet World event in London. The German incumbent is migrating away from Ericsson’s 5G packet core in favour of Mavenir’s cloud-native solution, as part of a broader effort to rationalise its network onto a single shared cloud infrastructure it calls the Horizontal TelCo Cloud (HTC).
The rationale is IT estate consolidation rather than any geopolitical or security concern. Deutsche Telekom has historically run more than 50 core network applications across 50 separate infrastructure stacks. HTC, built on Kubernetes and the telco’s own T-CaaS containers-as-a-service layer, aims to replace this fragmented model with a unified platform across all core functions. Ericsson is conspicuously absent from the initiative at present, though Deutsche Telekom has stated it remains in dialogue about future cloud-native function deployment.
The story has wider industry relevance. Deutsche Telekom is contributing elements of HTC to the Linux Foundation’s Sylva initiative, which seeks to create a common open-source cloud platform across European telcos. Orange is a Sylva co-champion, and BT runs a comparable initiative called Network Cloud. Ericsson’s continued insistence on maintaining its own cloud infrastructure stack, while rivals Nokia sold theirs to Red Hat in 2023, is increasingly a source of friction with large operators intent on horizontal cloud strategies. The question of whether a common telco cloud layer can succeed where previous industry-wide initiatives have stalled will define a significant portion of the core network market over the next three to five years.
Fixed wireless access continued its technical evolution this week with two related stories. Samsung and Qualcomm announced the validation of 5G Power Class 1 (PC1) capabilities for FWA, using Samsung’s vRAN platform, 3.7 GHz Massive MIMO radios and Qualcomm’s Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Platform with the X85 modem-RF chipset. PC1 is a 3GPP standard that enables higher transmission power from CPE devices, improving both uplink throughput and coverage range at the cell edge.
The lab results are significant: uplink throughput improvements of up to ten times at the cell edge versus PC1.5 standards, and coverage extension of up to 40%. Field testing has been completed on a US Tier 1 operator network, with commercial availability targeted for 2027. For urban deployments, the technology promises a fibre-like experience for bandwidth-intensive applications; for rural markets, the 40% coverage gain has direct implications for the economics of bridging the digital divide. As AI applications, AR/VR and cloud-based workloads continue to demand stronger uplink performance, PC1 positions 5G FWA as a more credible alternative to fixed broadband across a wider range of environments.
The Jio story this week provided further evidence of FWA’s commercial momentum at scale. Reporting Q4 results, Jio confirmed 27 million fixed broadband connections, with approximately 75% of new home connections coming through its JioAirFiber FWA product. With tens of thousands of homes being added per day at peak periods, Jio is demonstrating the mass-market potential of wireless-based home connectivity in a large, diverse market.
Jio Platforms reported a 5G subscriber base of 268 million at the end of March 2026, with 5G traffic now accounting for nearly 55% of its total mobile traffic. Data volumes reached 241 exabytes annually, up 31% year-on-year. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 449.2 billion, up 12.7% year-on-year, with net profits growing 13%. Beyond raw scale, Jio is investing in proprietary network technologies including custom beamforming solutions for high-density venues, AI-driven energy optimisation, and enterprise-grade managed connectivity bundles incorporating Wi-Fi, security and compute services.
SK Telecom told a similarly two-strand story, with its core 5G wireless business recovering following last year’s cybersecurity challenges while its AI infrastructure division accelerated sharply. The Korean operator added 210,000 handset subscribers in Q1, bringing its 5G base to 17.8 million. AI data centre revenue grew 89.3% year-on-year to KRW 131.4 billion, driven by GPU-as-a-Service demand and higher utilisation at key facilities. SK Telecom is positioning itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure provider, from data centres and models through to enterprise services, with a sovereign AI foundation model in development. As Omdia analyst Rémy Pascal observed, the operator’s combination of recovering core telecom business and rapidly scaling AI infrastructure makes it one of the most closely watched operators globally.
Optus and Ericsson claimed a world-first carrier aggregation milestone on a live 5G SA network in Sydney, achieving peak downlink throughput of 3.4 Gbps by combining four mid-band components across 900 MHz, 2.1 GHz, 2.3 GHz and 3.5 GHz using 220 MHz of total bandwidth. The specific novelty is the aggregation of 180 MHz across the 2.3 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands simultaneously, a combination not previously demonstrated. On the uplink, two-component carrier aggregation achieved 200 Mbps combining FDD and TDD bands. The trial was conducted using commercial devices including the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, underlining that the performance gains are accessible in the near term for end users in high-traffic environments such as CBDs, transport hubs and event venues.
On a longer time horizon, Ericsson published research this week exploring how hybrid quantum-classical computing could transform RAN planning. The work focuses on Tracking Area (TA) planning, an optimisation challenge that scales exponentially with network density, making it increasingly intractable for classical heuristic methods. A hybrid pipeline, combining classical preprocessing with quantum exploration of solution spaces, demonstrated the potential to reach higher-quality configurations than classical approaches alone. The research is at the simulator stage, reflecting the current constraints of NISQ-era hardware, but the formulation is designed to be compatible with future quantum processors. For operators managing ultra-dense 5G and 6G deployments, quantum-assisted planning may prove a strategic necessity rather than an academic exercise.
Two stories this week underscored the breadth of the private 5G addressable market beyond the enterprise campus. Nokia Federal Solutions and Lockheed Martin announced a modular, open-architecture 5G solution designed for US and allied defence forces, integrating Nokia’s carrier-grade 5G within the Department of War’s CMOSS (C5ISR/Modular Open Suite of Standards) framework. The plug-and-play architecture is designed to enable military vehicles and expeditionary platforms to use commercial-grade 5G in operational environments, reducing integration complexity and enabling capability updates without disrupting existing systems. The alignment with a commercial-first defence strategy reflects the growing acceptance that commercial 5G technology can meet stringent military requirements for security and resilience.
Nokia’s blog this week also made the case for private LTE/5G in power utility operations, where the combination of grid modernisation, distributed energy resources, aging infrastructure and the coming AI-driven surge in data centre power demand is placing unprecedented pressure on utilities’ operational communications. A private wireless network offers utilities control over device access, security policies, coverage priorities and traffic handling in ways that public networks cannot match, with high-value outcomes including improved grid visibility, faster outage response and a secure foundation for AI-driven automation tools.
Verizon drew attention this week with a disclosure of its digital twin-based approach to post-storm network recovery. Using high-resolution 3D imagery captured by drone fleets, combined with AI-driven comparison of before-and-after network models, the system allows engineers to identify and plan the repair of storm-damaged antennas, cables and equipment without waiting for flood waters to recede or roads to clear. The approach accelerates network recovery and reduces unnecessary site visits. Verizon is also testing permanent satellite backhaul at storm-prone macro cell sites across the US Southeast, supplemented by a fleet of 2,600 satellite assets for disaster-zone connectivity. The operator has additionally launched its Disaster Response Corps, a programme of employee volunteers trained by the American Red Cross to support community recovery efforts.
In Africa, operators continued to report strong financial results underpinned by data growth. MTN Nigeria posted service revenue growth of 36.2% year-on-year in Q1 2026, with data revenue up 52.4%, as mobile broadband adoption accelerated and its 5G FWA offering gained traction in urban markets. Vodacom Tanzania recorded 22% revenue growth for the year to March 2026, with data revenue up 31%, driven by smartphone adoption and M-Pesa financial services. Tanzania’s 5G rollout remains at an early stage, but Vodacom is investing in core and transmission infrastructure ahead of future deployment. In Zambia, Huawei deepened its partnership with the ICT Association of Zambia to deliver training in 5G deployment, cloud computing, AI and cybersecurity through its regional ICT Academy network, as part of a continent-wide effort that has trained more than 3 million ICT professionals since 2008.
€475 billion required for Europe to complete its 5G journey and regain digital leadership
The GSMA’s new investment analysis lays out the scale and structural causes of Europe’s 5G financing gap, and the regulatory reforms required to close it.
https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/e475-billion-required-for-europe-to-complete-its-5g-journey-and-regain-digital-leadership-new-gsma-study-finds/
BT preps 5G network slicing services for this summer
Light Reading’s detailed account of BT’s slicing timeline, its 5G SA coverage benchmarks and its Euro 2028 network partnership provides a useful snapshot of where UK 5G commercialisation stands.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/bt-preps-5g-network-slicing-services-for-this-summer
Deutsche Telekom made cloud jump from Ericsson to Mavenir in 5G
Light Reading’s deep-dive into Deutsche Telekom’s Horizontal TelCo Cloud strategy illuminates one of the most consequential architectural decisions in the European core network market.
https://www.lightreading.com/mobile-core/deutsche-telekom-made-cloud-jump-from-ericsson-to-mavenir-in-5g
From classical to quantum: Transforming RAN planning for future networks
Ericsson’s research blog sets out how hybrid quantum-classical computing could become a practical tool for network planning as 5G densifies and 6G approaches.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2026/5/from-classical-to-quantum-transforming-ran-planning-for-future-networks
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