5G and artificial intelligence (AI) are driving growth in the telecommunications and mobile industry.
This is according to GSMA Intelligence’s new “Global Mobile Trends 2025” report that examines key verticals within the telecom/mobile industry.
In terms of enterprise and consumer 5G:
- Adoption continues to grow. By the end of 2025, there will be around 2,7-billion 5G mobile connections globally. For most operators, around 70% of revenues comes from the consumer segment.
- Private 5G is about more than manufacturing: New verticals are emerging as key consumers of private 5G including oil and gas, defence, broadcasting/media, healthcare and ports/airports. Along with this new use cases emerge leveraging increased uplink bandwidth and lower latency communication
- Growing in number and scale: The number of private network deployments is growing, across regions. 2025 will see enterprises increasingly move beyond trials and proofs of concept (POCs) towards fully commercial deployments.
- Cloud technologies are critical for digital transformation: Nearly half of enterprises undertaking digital transformation make advanced use of the cloud. Newer use cases are increasing the attention on edge cloud with combined spend on cloud and edge accounting for 8% of total enterprise spend on digital transformation during 2024–2030.
For telco AI:
- Spend on AI is growing: Enterprises will allocate 14% of their digital transformation budget to generative AI and broader AI from 2024 to 2030. There’s a shift towards hybrid AI, recognising the need for edge cloud investment as not all workloads can be processed in the public cloud.
- AI for networks – energy and sustainability: RAN consumes 80% to 85% of telecom infrastructure energy. AI-powered RAN Intelligent Controllers and traffic steering can improve resource allocation, automate fault detection, and support sustainability by reducing power consumption, offsetting the energy rise from AI model training in data centres.
- Networks for AI – new revenue models: AI inference enables new use cases like industrial robotics, digital twins, IoT and VR/AR, creating new revenue streams for operators. Monetisation opportunities include GPU-as-a-service, AI model licensing, and localised AI infrastructure. Distributed computing also reduces energy costs, making AI adoption a revenue driver and cost-saving strategy for enterprises.
When it comes to NTN and satellite:
- Industry verticals will look to move beyond satellite as backhaul only. The IoT revenue opportunity alone could be measured in billions of dollars.
- Partial service with LEO will expand. With several constellations coming online in 2025 and expected integration work with 5G coming, the addressable market will grow.
- Operators to target consumers as well as enterprises. Bridging the digital divide will become the first target user group, with unconnected users in the millions across the world. However, IoT use cases will come into play too.