Telecoms in 2025: an industry on the cusp or facing a false AI dawn?

Details: Julian Bright; Category: Blogs & Opinion; 24 December 2025; 20629 views

History will judge whether 2025 proves to have been pivotal for the telecoms industry or perhaps heralding a false dawn. The technologies and tools necessary for service providers to transition from connectivity providers to digital services companies continued to be rolled out over the year, yet network investments have struggled to recover from recent lean years and monetising 5G connectivity remains a challenge.

Whether new life can be injected into telecoms seems increasingly to rest on building a strategy for AI. Talk at the close of 2024 was of Gen AI, and of balancing infrastructure investments with monetisation while managing issues such as energy consumption. Concerns were that investments would fail to start generating the hoped-for returns although large-scale spending on AI infrastructure was expected to continue.

And as the tech giants continued to spend heavily, fears that the AI bubble might burst have so far failed to materialise. Deep concerns persist that the technology has been over-hyped, yet the drive for all players to ready for the wider and deeper implementation of AI across all areas of networks, operations, services and support, continues apace.

At the turn of the year the promise of benefits to come is fueling a tangible sense of anticipation that is impacting all markets, both developed and developing. Despite barely progressing beyond trials and proofs of concept, the year-end has been characterised by a growing mood of expectation among the wider industry, underpinned by the belief that an all-pervasive AI-driven future has the potential to transform industry players ready for the new digital services era.

RAN equipment market stabilises

The past year has seen a general stabilising of RAN equipment sales although regional investment cycles and competition between vendors continue to impact 5G growth in specific markets.

Ericsson reported strong growth in RAN sales in Africa in Q3 (partly driven by 4G modernisation) while sales in India and the Americas were impacted by reduced network investment. Nokia experienced modest year-on-year growth in network infrastructure in Q3, although with a notable decline in sales in Latin America and Greater China.

Research firm Dell’Oro Group reported that, while near-term RAN expectations remain muted following two years of steep declines, total RAN revenues for the first three quarters of 2025, including baseband, radio hardware, and software, were flat outside of China and up when excluding North America.

“Some of the leading RAN suppliers are still cautiously optimistic that more investments are needed over the long-term to ensure the networks evolve from a connectivity pipe into an intelligence grid,” said the analyst firm.

5G progress steady but unspectacular

As of November 2025, only seven operators had launched 5G-Advanced networks according to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, including operators in China, Macao and Malaysia. Those in Asia (notably India, Uzbekistan and Taiwan) are leading the investment drive.

The number of public network operators introducing standalone 5G continued to show steady but unspectacular growth. As of mid-November, just 11 operators had launched or soft-launched 5G SA networks during the year according to the GSA, compared with 18 in the previous year. Growth of standalone 5G was particularly sluggish in Africa, with only five operators in four countries investing in the technology as of the end of September 2025, making up just under 3 per cent of the global total.

Private 5G networks presented an entirely different picture, however. In August, research firm SNS Telecom and IT reported that the previous 12 months had seen a noticeable increase in standalone private 5G network deployments by companies ranging from household names to industrial giants, with China representing the largest market.

Surge in Fixed-Wireless Access

Growth of fixed-wireless access (FWA) continued apace during 2025 offering a viable alternative to fixed-line broadband and across a wider demographic than merely remote or rural regions. Ericsson’s Mobility Report noted that over half of FWA service providers are already offering speed-based tariff plans.

Robust demand for FWA in India during 2025 saw Jio grow to become the largest global FWA provider in terms of the number of connections (9.5 million as of Q3 2025), while the combined number of connections from Jio and Airtel reached 12 million as of September 2025, says Ericsson.

AI-RAN could boost Open RAN

Early steps towards the integration of AI-powered RAN technology into vendors’ RAN portfolios has been a key development in 2025. The strategic partnership between Nvidia and Nokia announced in October, will see the former add its AI-powered RAN technology to Nokia’s RAN portfolio, allowing Nokia’s operator customers to launch AI-native 5G Advanced and 6G networks on Nvidia platforms.

Discussion around the complementarity between O-RAN and AI-RAN increased during the year, with the addition of agentic AI capability on top of the O-RAN platform seen as potentially providing greater impetus to O-RAN’s otherwise sluggish adoption.

The year of Massive MIMO

A great deal of vendor activity during the year was focused on the development of Massive-MIMO (M-MIMO) systems and on combining multiple frequency bands ranging above and below 1Ghz to provide the capacity, coverage and efficiencies necessary to incorporate legacy networks and support the evolution of 5G to 5G-Advanced, as well as providing the basis for future AI applications.

In June, Ericsson and Telstra announced the commercial deployment of 5G triple-band FDD Massive MIMO, claimed as a world’s first, and incorporating 1800MHz, 2100MHz and 2600MHz FDD bands. The vendor says its solution supports up to twice the previously available downlink capacity, up to three times uplink, and smarter beamforming for stronger signal quality and better cell edge performance.

Huawei claimed a first with the verification of its sub-1 GHz (700 MHz, 800 MHz, and 900 MHz) Massive MIMO solution in October, said to be the first of its kind for commercial use. “The results highlight a ground-breaking leap in the spectral efficiency of sub-1 GHz bands,” said the company.

Focus turns to Agentic AI

AI again dominated discussions during the year as investments continued to run ahead of the commercialisation of AI-based services. In a year when telcos were expected to begin channeling their investments in Gen AI more towards revenue-generating opportunities rather than back-office productivity, managing the proliferation of AI-generated content as the technology grew to become more widely embedded across devices and applications was of increasing interest.

Meanwhile, the quest to derive more value from AI moved the discussion on from GenAI towards agentic AI, with its capability to handle highly complex processes and drive fully autonomous networks and processes.

By mid-year, the shift towards agentic AI was already well underway, noted BSS/OSS provider Cerillion, with operators in every region launching initiatives. Whilst telcos are still optimistic about the value of AI, the technology is yet to demonstrate that the value is truly transformational, says Cerillion.

Analysts too are casting doubt on the sustainability of early trials and proofs of concept. Gartner goes so far as to suggest that 40% of current agentic AI projects are likely to be cancelled by end of 2027.

While some are sceptical, others believe the technology shows greater promise providing, in the case of telcos for example, that their data networks are sufficiently integrated and robust to fulfil the demands of AI. Huawei identifies the three critical factors for the adoption of effective agentic AI solutions as effectiveness, reliability (stable operation and trustworthiness), and cost (the balance between cost and performance). The company says it already has commercial deployments of agentic AI with more than 60 operators.

Aside from the Nvidia/Nokia agreement, among the more high-profile initiatives during the year was Reliance Industries’ joint venture with Meta to build agentic AI enterprise platforms and tools for businesses in India and select international markets. This stands out as an attempt to address affordable, enterprise-grade AI-Platform-as-a-Service.

Convergence is key

The convergence of AI and evolving network technologies and architectures such as 5G-Advanced, Massive MIMO, edge computing, cloud, network slicing and IoT, potentially gives operators the tools to build fully autonomous, highly integrated and optimised networks, and transition from providers of connectivity to fully digital service companies. The question is whether 2025 will prove to be the year when the groundwork for this transformation was laid.