Research: Telecom connectivity revenues up 4% in 2025
April 21, 2026
Omdia’s latest market update reveals that the global connectivity market spanning mobile, fixed broadband and fixed voice, reached $333 billion (€283.1bn) in Q4 2025, representing a 5 per cent YoY growth. Full year revenues totaled $1.3 trillion in 2025, up 4 per cent 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 3 billion connections globally and growing 34 per cent YoY. While still behind 4G, which stands at 8.3 billion connections, 5G adoption is accelerating rapidly. Asia remains the largest market, accounting for 69 per cent of global 5G connections.
Fixed broadband connections reached 1.6 billion in 2025, with FTTx broadband continuing to dominate as the leading technology, surpassing 1.16 billion connections, and growing 7 per cent annually. In Q4 2025 India overtook the US to become the leading 5G FWA market in the world, with 14.5 million connections compared to 13.9 million in the US.
The global ranking of telecoms operators by connectivity revenues continues to be dominated by operators from the US and China, which together account for eight out of the top ten positions. The remaining two operators are based in Japan.
Global CAPEX totaled $303 billion in 2025. Although this represents a 2 per cent year-on-year decline, it marks an improvement from the 3.5 per cent decline recorded in 2024.
Ari Lopes, Omdia Practice Leader for Service Provider Markets, commented: ”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 realise meaningful returns from investments in new technologies.”