The second edition of Ookla and Omdia’s 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 optimisation.

Globally, 5G SA availability based on Speedtest sample share reached 17.6 per cent in Q4 2025, up modestly from 16.2 per cent 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 per cent premium over non-standalone networks, though this figure masks significant regional variation driven by spectrum allocation depth, carrier aggregation maturity, and user-plane engineering.

Further key takeaways include:

• Europe’s 5G SA sample share more than doubled from 1.1 per cent to 2.8 per cent between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025.
  • The acceleration was driven by Austria (8.7 per cent), Spain (8.3 per cent), UK (7 per cent), and France (5.9 per cent), with these countries accounting for the vast majority of European SA connections.
• However, the region still trails North America by 27 percentage points and emerging Asia by 30 percentage points.
• Median download speeds of 205 Mbps on European SA networks, while 45 per cent faster than NSA, remain the lowest among major developed regions.
• From a global perspective:
  • North America leads in 5G SA adoption acceleration: its SA share grew from 8.2 per cent in Q1 2023 to 29.9 per cent in Q4 2025.
  • Asia leads in 5G availability: China continues to dominate with 80.9 per cent 5G SA sample share and over 10 million 5G Advanced subscribers.
  • The GCC has established itself as the global 5G SA performance leader: it delivers the world’s fastest 5G SA download speeds at 1.13 Gbps median.

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Tags: 5G, europe, Ookla