Why Only 10% of Telcos Run 5G SA? (Because It’s Hard)

Only 10% of operators run 5G SA today. New cores and spectrum hurdles make it far tougher than the hype suggests.

Why Only 10% of Operators Have 5G SA

The numbers are sobering: as of mid-2025, only about 10% of mobile operators worldwide have launched 5G Standalone (SA).

That means nine out of ten are still running on 5G Non-Standalone (NSA), a halfway house that boosted bandwidth but never delivered on the real 5G promise. That’s 71 operators in 40 countries, serving just over half of the global population, but still only a sliver compared to the 331 non-standalone (NSA) networks globally.

Only 71 operators have launched 5G SA versus 331 on NSA, proof that true 5G is still the exception, not the rule

NSA was essentially 4G++. It offered bigger channels and new spectrum, but remained anchored on LTE radios and an evolved, virtualized 4G core. It looked and felt faster for consumers, but it wasn’t a fundamentally new network. By contrast, 5G SA introduces a cloud-native core, end-to-end slicing, lower latency, and the foundation for entirely new use cases.

On paper, it’s a no-brainer: if you’re already investing billions in new radios and spectrum, why not go all the way?

The answer is that 5G SA is hard. Really hard. Not just technically, but organizationally, financially, and operationally. For greenfield players, it’s a lottery ticket; you start from scratch and design SA into the DNA. But for legacy operators, rolling out SA means bolting a cloud-native architecture onto decades of legacy systems, spectrum allocations, billing stacks, and operational silos. That’s the real reason SA adoption is crawling at 10%.

In the following sections, I’ll unpack the industry’s challenges, and share some of my own frontline experience working on a 5G SA rollout inside a brownfield environment. Spoiler: it was less “software upgrade” and more “heart transplant while the patient is still running a marathon.”