• European Union (EU) trails North America and Asia in 5G deployment and coverage because different member states pursue different strategies and goals
• New Ookla report explicitly states that EU policy “acts as a barrier, not a catalyst, for 5G deployment in western and eastern European laggards”
• Regulatory policies have encouraged 5G investment in some European countries but “they have stifled it in others”
• The net result is a “two-speed competitiveness landscape”

Independent network performance analysis firm Ookla has published a new report that benchmarks progress (or lack of it) towards the European Union’s (EU) 5G deployment objectives and highlights just how disunited Europe is in terms of its regional approach to mobile communications.

Seattle, US-based Ookla is well known for its Speedtest app and service that tests the performance and quality of internet connections, and it has used second quarter 2025 figures gleaned from its Speedtest Intelligence data to produce 5G Coverage in Europe: Progress Toward Goals Amid Lingering Disparities, which makes for interesting and frequently sobering reading. 

Europe is now halfway through its 5G technology cycle and capital spending on 5G network expansion has passed its peak across most of the continent. On the legislative and regulatory side, the low- and mid-band 5G spectrum auctions are now history. Figures also show that the once seemingly permanent non-stop, runaway growth in mobile data traffic is, for the first time, slowing. Furthermore, European operators have adopted a more cautious and conservative approach to the deployment of 5G technologies than those in Asia and North America, particularly in the adoption of new technology variants such as 5G standalone (SA). This, European operators claim, is mainly because they face “challenging operating conditions” directly related to the unenthusiastic and limited increases in revenue per user (ARPU) that 5G subscribers are willing to pay. (When in doubt, blame the customer…)

Across the EU, the European Commission (EC) has put 5G front and centre in its bloc-wide strategy of “competitiveness” and has linked the aspects of “coverage availability, timely spectrum assignment, and vendor diversity to productivity gains and strategic autonomy.” EU’s 5G policy agenda is based three key imperatives: streamlining infrastructure deployment via initiatives such as the Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA) and the Digital Networks Act (DNA); subsidising “frontier” R&D through programmes including CEF Digital (Connecting Europe Facility) and SNS-JU (Smart Networking and Services Joint Undertaking); and “de-risking” vendor supply chains through the Security Toolbox and support for open RAN.

However, as the Ookla paper points out, the net result of Europe’s 5G rollout is a “two-speed competitiveness landscape, with some countries surging ahead in deployment while others fall behind.” Thus, during the second quarter of this year, the Nordic nations and southern European countries maintained a substantial lead in 5G availability, mainly thanks to 700 MHz bandwidth deployments that have driven double-digit coverage gains in countries such as Sweden and Italy. That said, 5G availability in the laggard countries of central and western Europe, such as Belgium, Hungary and the UK, 5G is less than half of the counties in the European vanguard.

The reality is that the deployment and adoption of 5G SA in Europe remains sluggish, increasing only slowly from a very low initial base and further widening the region’s gap with North America and Asia. At the end of June, in Europe, Spain was the clear leader in 5G SA deployment, with an 8% Ookla sample share compared with the EU average of just 1.3%. The report puts the Spanish success down to the country’s proactive use of EU recovery funds to subsidise 5G SA rollouts in underserved areas, with a particular focus on bridging the rural-urban digital divide. That’s the high point, but it is very low compared to progress in the US and China, where Ookla’s 5G sample indicates shares of above 20% in the US and and 80% in China and is evidence of the much greater pace of coverage and adoption in those countries.

Lack of an overarching EU 5G policy has resulted in a fragmented and damaged sector 

The absence of a coherent 5G expansion policy for Europe, as a whole. is reflected in the shattered mix of individual country policies based on widely different attitudes to spectrum assignment regimes and national economic and political factors, including cost, subsidies, the sharing of infrastructure, and service and coverage obligations, rather than intra-national geographies and cross-border co-operation.  As the Ookla report puts it, “This indicates that 5G competitiveness is shaped less by technology gaps or inherent market imbalances and more by effective policy execution.”

Overall, northern Europe leads in the 5G availability stakes but the Benelux countries and eastern Europe languish far down the field as also-rans. In Q2, 2025, Denmark boasted a 5G coverage rate of 83.9%, while Sweden had 77.8% and Greece had a 76.4% 5G availability rate. The Ookla team noted that Northern and Southern European nations are “disproportionately represented” among the countries with the highest 5G availability, having coverage rates up to twice as high as those in western and eastern nations such as the UK, (45.2%), Hungary (29.9%) and Belgium (11.9%). 

Denmark, Sweden and Norway, two Scandinavian countries with some of the lowest population densities and among the most highly challenging terrains in the whole of Europe, along with Denmark, whose geography is much more benign than its northern neighbours, are special in that they have introduced stringent 5G licence targets and obligations for rural or regional coverage obligations on 5G spectrum licenses. For example, in Sweden’s 700 MHz band auction, Telia was legally required to invest €25m from its license fee to provide at least 10 Mbit/s mobile broadband coverage in prioritised rural areas designated as lacking adequate service, with operators aiming for 99% nationwide population access by the end of this year.

Nordic countries have also actively promoted extensive network sharing, such as the TT Network joint venture between Telia and Telenor in Denmark and the Net4Mobility collaboration between Tele2 and Telenor in Sweden, and have leveraged loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB) or Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) to fund rural rollouts and support early 700 MHz deployments to create a “true” 5G coverage layer rather than relying solely on dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS). 

Elsewhere, Switzerland easily leads other countries such as Luxembourg and Belgium in 5G Availability, reaching 81.3% penetration by the end of June this year and it did so without reliance on government subsidies, but by keeping spectrum licence fees “affordable”, though the capital available to the network operators is helped by their exceptionally high ARPU (average revenue per user) levels.

All in all, the state of 5G in Europe is pretty much a curate’s egg, good in parts but decidedly addled in others where “policy acts as a barrier, not a catalyst for 5G deployment.” Thus, although regulatory policies have encouraged 5G investment in some northern and southern European countries, “they have stifled it in others.” For example, the UK’s Telecommunications Security Act forced operators to rip out and replace (Chinese) equipment designated to be a potential threat to national security, a move that soaked up capex. The UK’s relatively poor position in the 5G availability rankings has been compounded by a lack of stringent coverage obligations and post-Brexit funding gaps, as the UK was prevented from accessing the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) funds that, for example, helped Italian operators roll out their 5G networks.

However, the UK is now making significant progress in 5G SA deployment and the country’s Wireless Infrastructure Strategy articulates an “ambition” rather than a prescriptive intent to have 5G SA available in “all populated areas” by 2030. It is one of the most determinedly upbeat of targets, not only in Europe, but also across the rest of the world. Improvements are in train, but the train’s late.

– Martyn Warwick, Editor in Chief, TelecomTV