5G Outlook Report Signals 5G Optimism Based on These Factors

Spirent communications, a provider of automated network test and assurance, released its annual 5G Outlook Report, and the company believes its findings show signs of optimism for 5G.

The report, called It’s Halftime for 5G: Progress, Key Plays and Future Prospects is based on analysis performed on 415 new global 5G customer engagements in 2024 and looked at progress made over the first five years of 5G.

“Early revenue expectations for 5G were tempered following deployment and availability challenges during the first half of the 5G era,” said Spirent’s Head of Market Strategy, Steve Douglas. “But as 5G Standalone (SA) deployments continue to grow and 5G-Advanced starts to take off, telecom is poised to deliver the true capabilities of 5G that meet industry needs.”

Douglas believes that the current 5G era shows proof that things are moving in the right direction, pointing to the growth of technologies such as FWA.

“Notable early successes like 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) underscore long-term opportunity, and entering the second half of the 5G era, there’s everything to play for as 5G services present a pathway to monetization with a range of other technologies combining to comprise a strong foundation for sustainable growth.”

The company says that they worked with service providers, equipment manufacturers, and hyperscalers on 5G standalone and 5G Advanced testing in 2024. “Key drivers spanned performance, security, resilience, lifecycle management, customer experience and service-based testing, serving as encouraging indicators of accelerated deployments in 2025,” wrote Spirent in a press release.

5G SA and 5G Advanced 

Testing of 5G SA and Advanced are “encouraging indicators for acceleration,” says Spirent. Testing in 2024 with their customers leads the company to believe that the next 12 – 18 months will see commercial 5G SA go live among many of the network operators they worked with.

Other bright spots for 5G mentioned in the report include Cloud-Native Core, security and resilience, customer experience, 5G services, IP transport network, and new voice, video and video-chat services.

Spirent says the “second half of the 5G era” will be influenced by “5G FWA expansion towards enterprises and urban markets; 5G low-altitude economy and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs); the role of AI in telecommunications networks; augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) assisted video; and 6G early focus and projected timelines.”