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With global 5G coverage now surpassing 50% but consumer willingness to pay barely shifting, operators at MWC argued that the next chapter must be defined by utilisation.
The mobile industry expects to generate U$11.3 trillion worldwide by 2030 but telco executives at Mobile World Congress are still concerned that their networks will end up a dumb pipe.
“Telco networks are the digital backbone of the economy,” said Christel Heydemann, CEO, Orange at the event in Barcelona. “We are everywhere, we are essential, and yet for years we have been called a utility, a commodity. When a network goes down it is never just technical. Public services, hospitals and factories stall. We power the system but we barely shape its value.”
Calling the mobile industry “the nervous system of the digital world” Vivek Badrinath, Director General of trade body GSMA, said, “Today more than anything the lack of scale is hindering operators from making the necessary investment. If we want to realise the full promise of 5G and make a healthy foundation for a future 6G we must first and foremost complete the rollout of 5G.”
5G Advanced is the latest and final phase of 5G’s implementation and a critical one if next-generation services built on new spectrum under 6G are to be realised.
However, the gap between countries pressing ahead with it and those with slower rollout is widening. “In China, they have factories and hospitals running on 5G Advanced,” said Badrinath. “These are not just proof of concept. These are real life services in commercial use. But here in Europe we are losing ground. There is much more to be done to unlock the potential of 5G.”
Operators look for 5G payback
Audience polling during an event on monetising 5G highlighted the same tension— strong confidence in the technology, but uncertainty about the business model.
“With 5G standalone networks, speeds of over 1,000 megabits per second are possible under ideal conditions,” said Mani Manimohan, Head of Digital Infrastructure Policy and Regulation at the GSMA. “The mobile industry has achieved extraordinary technological progress, but many operators are still struggling to translate that technological brilliance into incremental revenue.”
In the first phase of 5G, the main targets were spectrum allocation, coverage, and faster deployment. Today, 5G covers more than half of the world’s population, and in some regions, coverage reaches 80–90%. This progress came at the cost of very high capital expenditure. Collectively, operators invested around U$250bn per year in network infrastructure and devices, according to GSMA.
The question being posed by operators at MWC is whether the industry needs a shift in thinking — one where innovation is based on connectivity and new services, rather than simply squeezing more bits out of radio waves.
“We are moving from a phase defined by rollout to one defined by utilisation,” said Manimohan. “The next chapter of 5G will not be about coverage. It will be about capability, experience and new revenue.”
Ericsson’s November 2025 mobility research suggested that the shift is already underway with around 65 differentiated 5G connectivity services in the market.
“These broadly fall into two categories: moment-based services and always-on premium services,” explained Marie Hogan, part of Ericsson’s 5G to 6G transition team.
The first is designed for short periods of high demand. “You might be an influencer at a concert and want to optimise your uplink for that moment, or a gamer who wants ultra-low latency for a specific session,” she said. “In those cases, customers may be willing to pay for better performance in a certain location or time window.”
The second category involves permanent or guaranteed service levels, often aimed at enterprises. “Premium services are always on,” she said. “A business may want optimised fixed wireless access, or a critical service may need priority connectivity at all times. It’s not always about speed — sometimes it’s about reliability or latency.”
The journey from selling raw data to digital services
Jakob Greiner, VP European Affairs at Deutsche Telekom said the industry had long promised advanced 5G use cases, and some are now becoming reality. “Five or ten years ago we showed slides about remote surgery and ultra-reliable networks,” he said. “Now we are starting to see real applications. That gives me optimism.”
However, he stressed that traditional best-effort internet will remain the foundation. “We are not replacing the normal internet. We are complementing it with specialised connectivity where it makes sense.”
Examples include cloud-gaming offers using network slicing, currently available to some DT customers at no extra cost. “From a European perspective, we are moving more slowly than in the US, but the direction is clear.”
He pointed to high-density environments such as stadiums as a clear future use case. “Thousands of fans, journalists and emergency teams all need reliable connectivity at the same time. In those situations, guaranteed performance has real value, and customers may be willing to pay for it.”
Kaan Terzioğlu, CEO of VEON Group, a digital operator based in Dubai, urged peers to “stop selling SMS and gigabytes of minutes” and instead provide “meaningful connectivity” services to customers.
“It means becoming a banking service and an entertainment service or providing an online consultation with your doctor,” he said. “Do that, and you gain loyalty and people spend more time and money with you.”
The real value now, he said, lay in offering services with “augmented intelligence”. VEON for instance is developing local language models in Bengali, Ukrainian, Punjabi and Uzbek rather than English, French or German because that’s what different populations deserve.
“Augmented Intelligence is going to reshape how humanity will progress,” Terzioğlu said. “The reality is that ‘homo augmentus’ is going to assassinate homo sapiens. In ten years or maybe sooner we will have the ability to organically connect to data [via our brains].”
“AI can augment our skills and make us very successful,” he said, “But the responsibility for shaping it is ours alone. The value systems we have built as humans are our only insurance.”
According to GSMA Intelligence consumer survey, the average premium consumers say they are willing to pay for 5G is around 5% and has remained at that level since 2020. The largest group of respondents isn’t willing to pay anything extra at all.
“Part of the reason lies in the limits of the consumer proposition,” says Matthew Iji, head of forecasting and modelling, GSMA Intelligence. “Many operators tried to monetise 5G through speed-base tiers and premium plans, only to discover willingness to pay for raw performance is capped.”
There was also an expectation 5G would have a single defining killer app. “Among those consumers who are not planning to upgrade, the most common reason given is that the existing network already does everything they need it to,” Iji said.
This leads to a more uncomfortable question: do consumers still care about the generational label at all? For many the answer is probably no. They care about what they can do – stream work connect consume rather than which radio technology happens to be underneath.
If the first five years of 5G were about engineering, the next five will be about economics; The answer as to whether 5G was truly worth it will ultimately be written not in speed tests or coverage maps but in balance sheets.
Breaking the habit
Operators may want us to spend more time using their digital services but Aaron Paul, the Breaking Bad actor, argued for less reliance on our devices.
“I’m not anti-technology but I love that some States [in the U.S] are banning smartphones in schools,” he said in the keynote ‘Technology, Addiction and Balance’. “When I was a kid, they’d never let me bring in a TV and a game console. But now kids bring a device with access to everything. It’s not just unhealthy and unsafe.”
Paul is backing the Light Phone, a new device with much of the functionality of a regular mobile but stripped of adverts, alerts and algorithms that keep us scrolling.
Kaiwei Tang, co‑founder and CEO of LIGHT, explained, “The mobile business model depends on engagement, but it’s hurting people’s well‑being. After 10–15 years of smartphones and social media, we should have spent more time understanding the tools we were creating. Now the same thing is happening with AI. Tools should improve human life - save us time so we can be creative, enjoy our relationships, and live fully.”
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