LONDON, April, 2026: Omdia’s latest market update reveals that the
global connectivity market spanning mobile, fixed broadband and fixed
voice, reached $333bn in Q4 2025, representing a 5% year-on-year (YoY)
growth. Full year revenues totaled $1.3 trillion in 2025, up 4% YoY
growth. The results highlight ongoing challenges for the telecom
industry, in which remains reliant on a slow growing core business while
still working to establish new revenue streams.
5G continues its strong growth trajectory, reaching 3bn connections
globally and growing 34% YoY. While still behind 4G, which stands at
8.3bn connections, 5G adoption is accelerating rapidly. Asia remains the
largest market, accounting for 69% of global 5G connections.
Fixed broadband connections reached 1.6bn in 2025, with FTTx broadband
continuing to dominate as the leading technology, surpassing 1.169bn
connections, and growing 7% annually. In Q4 2025 India overtook the
United States to become the leading 5G FWA market in the world, with
14.5m connections compared to 13.9m in the United States.
The global ranking of telecoms operators by connectivity revenues
continues to be dominated by operators from the United States and China,
which together account for eight out of the top ten positions. The
remaining two operators are based in Japan.
Global CAPEX totaled $303bn in 2025. Although this represents a 2%
year-on-year decline, it marks an improvement from the 3.5% decline
recorded in 2024.
Ari Lopes, Omdia Practice Leader for Service Provider Markets [1]
said:” Overall, the 2025 results show that the telecom industry’s
core business remains highly relevant, but is facing strong headwinds,
including slow growth, while the sector has yet to realize meaningful
returns from investments in new technologies.”
