Global technology research and advisory group Omdia, in its latest industry outlook, reveals that the global connectivity market spanning mobile, fixed broadband and fixed voice, reached USD 333 billion in Q4 2025, representing a 5% year-on-year (YoY) growth. Full-year revenues totalled USD 1.3 trillion in 2025, representing 4% year-over-year growth. The results highlight ongoing challenges for the telecom industry, which remains reliant on a slow-growing core business while still wading through new revenue streams.
“5G continues its strong growth trajectory, reaching three billion connections globally and growing 34% 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% of global 5G connections,” Omdia said.
According to the research and advisory group, fixed broadband connections reached 1.6 billion in 2025. FTTx continues to dominate as the leading technology, surpassing 1.169 billion connections and growing 7% annually. The term “FTTx” denotes broadband network architectures that use optical fibre to replace all or part of the traditional copper local loop.
“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 totalled USD 303 billion in 2025. Although this represents a 2% year-on-year decline, it marks an improvement from the 3.5% decline recorded in 2024,” the Omdia report said.
Ari Lopes, Omdia Practice Leader for Service Provider Markets, 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 realise meaningful returns from investments in new technologies.”
In terms of the American and Chinese companies dominating the global ranking of telecoms operators, a 2025 report from Dell’Oro, titled “4Q 2025 Mobile Core Network and Multi-Access Edge Computing Report,” stated that the top four vendors, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and ZTE, posted very strong growth rates in the year, apart from collectively accounting for about the same amount of market share from 2024 onwards.