A year on from our inaugural report, the global 5G SA narrative in 2026 has shifted from a coverage race to a capability contest. The GCC now delivers median download speeds five times those in Europe, while the U.S. has completed its Tier-1 SA launches. Europe is accelerating, but from a low base, and the gap with global leaders risks widening as 5G Advanced scales elsewhere.

The second edition of Ookla and Omdia’s flagship report on the global state of 5G Standalone 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.

Globally, 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 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.

For governments and regulators, the stakes of the SA transition have intensified. National competitiveness, digital sovereignty, and AI readiness have converged to reshape investment priorities across major markets. The European Commission’s Digital Networks Act, the U.S.’ supply chain diversification program, and China’s integration of 5G Advanced into its 15th Five-Year Plan all signal that 5G SA is now treated as foundational national infrastructure central to AI ambitions, and not merely a connectivity upgrade.

This year’s report significantly expands the scope of the analysis. For the first time, our research examines 5G SA’s impact on end-user battery life and voice performance (VoNR), quality of experience (QoE) metrics to cloud and gaming infrastructure, and the first wave of commercial monetization strategies spanning consumer network slicing, enterprise SLAs, and 5G Advanced segmentation. We also provide an assessment of the geopolitical context now shaping SA’s evolution, from Europe’s Digital Networks Act to the GCC’s sovereign AI infrastructure strategies.

Key Takeaways:

The GCC has established itself as the global 5G SA performance leader, with the UAE setting the speed benchmark

Led by e& and du’s aggressive 5G Advanced deployments, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 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 gap with global peers is narrowing, but the region still trails North America by 27 percentage points

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.

However, the region still trails North America by 27 percentage points 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.

5G SA delivers measurable performance and quality of experience gains, but end-to-end optimization separates leaders from laggards

Globally, SA connections delivered a 52% download speed premium (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.

Among European markets, France (41 ms to cloud endpoints), Austria (48 ms), and Finland (50 ms) 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.

The report also presents early evidence of a tangible consumer benefit of SA: battery life. In the UK, devices on EE’s 5G SA network recorded median discharge times approximately 22% longer than those on 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.

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 core 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 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.

On monetization, consumer strategies now span speed tiers (primarily Europe), network slicing (Singapore, France, and the U.S.), and 5G Advanced segmentation packages (China). Enterprise 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.

Download the full report

For the comprehensive analysis of 5G SA and 5G Advanced deployment, performance, and monetization across global markets, including new research on battery life, voice performance, quality of experience, geopolitical context, and expanded policy case studies from the UK, France, Brazil, Japan, and the UAE, download the full report, 5G Standalone and 5G Advanced: A Global Reality Check on 5G SA and 5G Advanced in 2026.