Dell’Oro: Mobile Core Networks +15% in 2025; Ookla: Global Reality Check on 5G SA and 5G Advanced in 2026
A recent Dell’Oro market research report estimates that 4G/5G Mobile Core Network (MCN) revenues rose 15% YoY in 2025, which was the fastest growth since 2014. For the first time, the 5G MCN market accounted for 50% share of the total MCN market.
Editor’s Note: The 4G and 5G Non Standalone (NSA) mobile core network market (Evolved Packet Core) is experiencing long-term decline as investments are finally shifting toward 5G standalone (SA) networks.
“In 2025, the MCN market recorded its highest year-over-year revenue growth rate since 2014,” stated Dave Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “This was driven by record-setting growth rates in all market segments: 4G MCN (highest since 2019), 5G MCN (highest since 2022), and Voice Core (highest since 2007). 4G MCN gains came from Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) and Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) regions; 5G MCN from all regions; and Voice Core, primarily from Asia Pacific and EMEA regions.
“5G MCNs led the way in 2025 growth, as 5G Standalone (5G SA) networks reached an inflection point and moved towards mass market appeal, as more 5G SA networks expand in population coverage in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Voice Core was the next major contributor to growth in 2025, driven by planned 3G MCN shutdowns, which required upgrades from Circuit Switched Core to IMS Core, and IMS Core modernization to a cloud-native IMS Core for VoNR in 5G SA networks. Meanwhile, 4G MCNs expanded due to subscriber growth in Africa and South America,” added Bolan.
Additional highlights from the 4Q 2025 Mobile Core Network and Multi-Access Edge Computing Report include:
- The top four vendors (Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and ZTE) posted very strong growth rates in 2025. Collectively, they accounted for about the same amount of market share as in 2024.
- The Multi-access and Edge Computing (MEC) market segment (a subsegment of the 5G MCN market) attained the highest growth rate of any MCN segment in 2025, with the China region remaining the dominant region for MEC implementations.
- Standard-setting bodies, vendors, and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) communities are collaborating to expand the ecosystem with new products, applications, and monetization features that are expected to deliver future benefits.
- Examples include RedCap radios, which reduce the cost of IoT devices for consumer wearables and industrial applications; network slicing for both mission-critical and on-demand applications; IMS data channels to increase monetization opportunities and enhance user experience; and Open APIs that enable developers to scale their applications across all MNOs, attracting the app development community.
- Agentic AI is expected to change data traffic patterns and alter the duration that subscribers remain connected to the network as agents operate on their behalf. This could represent a paradigm shift in the future, requiring increased MCN capacity, expanded vendor opportunities, and enhanced monetization for MNOs through pricing tiers.
The Dell’Oro Group Mobile Core Network & Multi-Access Edge Computing Quarterly Report offers complete, in-depth coverage of the market with tables covering manufacturers’ revenue, shipments, and average selling prices for Traditional Packet Core, Evolved Packet Core, 5G Packet Core, Policy, Subscriber Data Management, Signaling, Circuit Switched Core, and IMS Core by geographic regions. To purchase this report, please contact us at [email protected].
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Related: The second edition of Ookla and Omdia’s report on the global state of 5G Standalone core network confirms that the technology has moved beyond launch announcements into an execution-driven phase. By the close of 2025, the “coverage gap” between major economic blocs had narrowed, but a more consequential “capability gap” has emerged, reflecting divergent spectrum strategies, investment depth, and the extent to which operators have moved beyond baseline SA deployment toward end-to-end network optimization.
For government and regulatory bodies, 5G Standalone (SA) has evolved into a high-stakes strategic imperative. The intersection of national competitiveness, digital sovereignty, and AI readiness is fundamentally reshaping Capex priorities across Tier-1 markets.
- User Equipment (UE) Performance: Impact of 5G SA on battery life and the transition to Voice over New Radio (VoNR).
- Application-Layer QoE: Benchmarking latency and jitter for cloud-native and gaming infrastructure.
- Commercial Monetization: A review of the first commercial deployments of Network Slicing, Enterprise SLAs, and 5G-Advanced (Release 18) segmentation.
- Geopolitical Drivers: Assessing how sovereign AI strategies in the GCC and legislative shifts in Europe are dictating the global SA evolutionary path.
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5G Core network investment is accelerating as monetization transitions from concept to selective execution:
Omdia’s latest forecasts confirm the industry’s shift toward software-defined core capability as the primary driver of next-cycle investment. Global 5G SA core network software spending is projected to grow at an 8.8% CAGR between 2025 and 2030, with EMEA leading at 16.7%, significantly outpacing North America (5.5%) and Asia & Oceania (4.2%). This reflects EMEA’s later position in the deployment cycle, as the region is entering its period of peak 5G core adoption, while North America’s 5G core spending trajectory is expected to have peaked in 2025 following the commercial launches by AT&T and Verizon. By end of Q3 2025, 83 operators worldwide had deployed 5G core networks, with 5G core investment accounting for 63.6% of global core network function software spending.
5G Core Investment Accelerates Across Regions:
- 5G SA availability based on Speedtest® sample share reached 17.6% in Q4 2025, up modestly from 16.2% a year earlier, indicating that roughly one in six 5G Speedtests worldwide now occurs on a 5G standalone network. The headline global median SA download speed of 269.51 Mbps represents a 52% premium over non-standalone networks, though this figure masks significant regional variation driven by spectrum allocation depth, carrier aggregation maturity, and user-plane engineering.
- Asia leads in 5G availability: China continues to dominate with 80.9% 5G SA sample share and over 10 million 5G Advanced subscribers.
- Globally, 5G SA connections delivered a 52% download speed premium to 5G NSA (mostly an artifact of rich spectrum allocation and lower network load) and improved median multi-server latency by over 6% compared to NSA. However, this year’s report finds that a standalone core migration alone does not guarantee a better end-user experience. Quality of experience analysis reveals a nuanced picture: SA improves video and cloud infrastructure latency in Europe versus NSA, but underperforms NSA for gaming latency within the same region. North America records the lowest absolute SA cloud and gaming latency, consistent with dense hyperscaler adjacency and mature interconnect ecosystems.
- The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was the global 5G SA performance leader, with the UAE setting the speed benchmark Led by e& and du’s aggressive 5G Advanced deployments, the delivered the world’s fastest 5G SA median download speeds in Q4 2025 at 1.13 Gbps, nearly five times that of Europe. The UAE alone reached a median of 1.24 Gbps on SA networks, a speed that would be considered exceptional even for full-fiber broadband in developed markets. The deployment of four-carrier aggregation and enhanced MIMO technology, coupled with the strategic allocation of premium mid-band spectrum to the SA network, demonstrates the performance ceiling that a fully realized 5G SA architecture can achieve.
- South Korea followed at 767 Mbps, driven by wide 3.5 GHz channel bandwidth, with the U.S. at 404 Mbps following the completion of nationwide SA deployments by all three Tier-1 operators. Europe, at 205 Mbps, trails all developed regions, though the region’s SA networks still deliver a 45% download speed premium over NSA, confirming the performance value of the SA transition where material spectrum depth is allocated.
Europe’s 5G SA sample share more than doubled from 1.1% to 2.8% between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, driven by accelerated deployments in Austria (8.7%), Spain (8.3%), the United Kingdom (7.0%), and France (5.9%). These four markets now account for the vast majority of European SA connections. The United Kingdom and France registered the strongest year-on-year acceleration in Europe, each gaining 5.3 percentage points, reflecting the impact of investment-linked merger conditions and competition in the United Kingdom, as well as targeted R&D policy support in France.
Among European markets, France (41ms to cloud endpoints), Austria (48ms), and Finland (50ms) demonstrate what is achievable where backbone quality, peering density, and routing discipline are strong. These outcomes reflect an underappreciated end-to-end network stack optimization dividend, encompassing data-center proximity, fiber backhaul depth, and user-plane topology, rather than a pure “SA dividend” alone.
However, Europe still trails North America by 27% and emerging Asia by 30%. At the global level, the U.S. remains the largest accelerator in absolute terms over the last year, with SA sample share rising 8.2 percentage points to 31.6% year-on-year, driven by the sequential rollout of SA across all Tier-1 operators beyond T-Mobile. Firmware fragmentation, where handset OEMs gatekeep SA network access pending individual carrier certification, and tariff structures that fail to incentivize migration from NSA, remain the primary barriers to faster European adoption.
The report also presents early evidence that battery life is a tangible consumer benefit of 5G SA. In the UK, devices on EE’s 5G SA network recorded median discharge times approximately 22% longer than those on 5G NSA, with O2 showing an 11% advantage. These gains likely stem from features like SA’s unified control plane, which eliminates the dual-connectivity overhead of NSA configurations.
Consumer strategies now span speed tiers (primarily Europe), 5G network slicing (Singapore, France, and the U.S.), and 5G Advanced segmentation packages (China). Enterprise 5G network slicing presents the much larger long-term revenue opportunity, with T-Mobile’s SuperMobile representing the first nationwide commercial B2B slicing service in the U.S. Countries with coordinated regulatory frameworks, implementing clear coverage obligations, investment incentives, or infrastructure consolidation policies with deployment remedies, consistently outperform those with fragmented or reactive approaches, reinforcing the report’s finding that policy has emerged as a primary competitive differentiator in 5G SA outcomes globally.
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References:
MCN Market Roared Back in 2025 With 15 Percent Growth, According to Dell’Oro Group
https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-sa-2026
Dell’Oro: RAN market stable, Mobile Core Network market +14% Y/Y with 72 5G SA core networks deployed
AT&T deploys nationwide 5G SA while Verizon lags and T-Mobile leads
Ericsson CEO’s strong statements on 5G SA, WRC 27, and AI in networks
Ookla: Uneven 5G deployment in Europe, 5G SA remains sluggish; Ofcom: 28% of UK connections on 5G with only 2% 5G SA
Ericsson reports ~flat 2Q-2025 results; sees potential for 5G SA and AI to drive growth
Téral Research: 5G SA core network deployments accelerate after a very slow start
Google Fiber and Nokia demo network slicing for home broadband in GFiber Labs
Analysts: Telco CAPEX crash looks to continue: mobile core network, RAN, and optical all expected to decline
Global 5G Market Snapshot; Dell’Oro and GSA Updates on 5G SA networks and devices
Dell’Oro: Mobile Core Network market has lowest growth rate since 4Q 2017
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Integrating 5G Standalone (SA) and cloud-native tools into telecom networks has proven significantly more difficult than originally expected. Managing and orchestrating these slices involves several layered challenges:
1. Technical Complexity & Orchestration
-Operational Management: Current telco networks often rely on decades-old Operations & Maintenance (O&M) procedures that cannot keep pace with the dynamic, automated nature of 5G-Advanced slicing.
-End-to-End Coordination: Orchestrating a slice across different domains (Access, Transport, and Core) and multiple vendors remains a major hurdle, as there is currently no unified performance management technique.
-Scalability: Managing millions of physical and virtual components that must interact harmoniously while maintaining strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) like 1ms latency is a massive undertaking for existing orchestrators.
2. Security & Isolation Risks
-Slice Isolation Failures: The “cornerstone” of slicing is isolation; if it fails, an attacker could move laterally from a low-security slice (like a public IoT sensor) into a high-value slice (like critical infrastructure).
-Expanded Attack Surface: Each new slice introduces its own management interfaces and APIs, effectively adding “more doors to lock” for security teams.
-Cross-Slice DoS: Even with logical separation, slices still share physical hardware (CPU, memory, spectrum). A traffic flood in one slice can unintentionally “starve” neighboring slices of resources.
3. Organizational & Regulatory Barriers
-Net Neutrality: Regulators are still debating whether prioritizing specific slices (e.g., for premium gaming) constitutes illegal discrimination under net neutrality laws.
-Skills Shortage: There is a critical scarcity of “unicorn” experts who possess deep knowledge of both 5G network architecture and modern cybersecurity.
-Standardization Gaps: While the 3GPP has provided architectural specs, there are still no clear, industry-wide standards for the actual implementation and security management of these slices.