• Omdia measured an 83% year-on-year rise in 5G packet-core investment in the fourth quarter of 2025.
  • North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa led growth; the data does not show that core spending grew faster than RAN spending.
  • 5G SA launches are increasing, but launch, coverage, active subscribers, commercial offers and revenue are five different measures.

The number is specific: 83% in one quarter

Omdia’s 19 March 2026 release says communications service providers increased 5G packet-core investment by 83% in Q4 2025 compared with Q4 2024. North America and EMEA were the leading growth regions. Omdia counted 88 operators with commercial 5G standalone (SA) networks and forecast strong double-digit core-investment growth during 2026.

The signal should not be stretched beyond that scope. It covers one quarter, one product category and one annual comparison. Neither Omdia nor Telecoms.com’s analysis publishes in these items a dollar total, a multi-year series or a comparison between core and RAN growth rates. The claim that core spend is rising faster than RAN investment is therefore not supported by the cited evidence.

Why SA moves purchasing into the core

3GPP distinguishes two architectures. In non-standalone 5G, the 5G radio remains anchored to the 4G EPC. In SA, New Radio connects to a 5G core built as a service-based architecture. Migration therefore requires new software and functions for authentication, sessions, mobility, policy, user-plane handling and slice selection.

The SA core enables network slicing, modular network functions and more flexible placement of the user plane. “Enabled” does not mean widely deployed or profitable. A slice also needs radio and transport resources, policies, service assurance, compatible devices and plans, security controls and a customer willing to pay.

Launch counts change with date and definition

Omdia reported 88 launches on 19 March. GSA counted 95 launched SA services at the end of March 2026, up 42% from Q1 2025, within 392 operators that had launched some form of 5G. The difference can reflect cutoff dates, what counts as a service and additions to each database. Neither count measures population coverage, devices attached to the SA core, traffic, active slices or revenue.

Opensignal measured observed SA signals and found wide variation at the end of 2025: 57% of populated locations in the United States, 40% in Australia, 36% in India and about 10% in Japan. Those experience measures are not interchangeable with launch counts. They show why a national announcement does not establish day-to-day availability.

Monetisation is a separate test

Omdia links investment to the search for new revenue and cites AT&T’s SA and RedCap rollout and Verizon’s enterprise FWA slice. These are infrastructure and offer examples, not disclosed financial results. A later Ericsson update in June 2026 counted 84 commercial differentiated-connectivity offers based on network slicing, up from 65 in November 2025. It did not state their revenue, margins, subscriber numbers or utilization.

A return-on-investment case must separate capital spent, network activation, eligible coverage and devices, attached users, SA traffic, slice contracts, pricing, delivered service quality, operating cost and incremental revenue. The 83% jump illuminates the first step, not the rest.

Integration is a major part of the bill

A GSMA Intelligence survey of rollout barriers found that 26% of surveyed operators in 2024 named technology maturity as the largest SA obstacle, while 19% cited integration difficulties. Multi-vendor architectures can expand choice but add interfaces, testing and accountability. A cloud-native core also adds orchestration, observability, resilience, software skills and API security to established telecom operations.

Slicing extends the control surface. 3GPP describes slice-specific authorization so that a network function authorized for one slice cannot access another. Operators must coordinate identity, policy, function placement, isolation and service-level commitments across domains. Software flexibility does not automatically reduce total cost.

The vendor market is not simply RAN versus core

Omdia ranked Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Cisco as the top five core-network vendors by Q4 market share. That is a category and period ranking, not evidence that RAN suppliers are losing influence: several vendors sell radio, core and software. Proving a value shift would require comparable segment revenue, share over time and margin data.

What to watch next

The next controls are quarterly and annual core-market growth, absolute spending, regional mix, cloud-native share, SA subscribers and traffic, depth of coverage, contracted slices, service revenue and cost, and migration incidents. Until those series are combined, Q4 2025 establishes an acceleration in 5G-core purchasing — not a proven worldwide shift from RAN to core or completed monetisation.