- Nations with strong 5G infrastructure will have agency in the digital economy. Those that don’t, won’t
- The defining factor in countries’ ability to roll out 5G is political, not technological
- Without 5G, artificial intelligence is like a broken pencil: pointless
AI has mesmerized the world’s investors, governments and media, creating the largest tech bubble of all time. That obsession has diverted attention from another vital technology: 5G.
Building the new global digital economy requires a full-stack approach, including agile optical networks, robust water and electrical utilities and competent national political governance.
But also, and this is important, it requires 5G.
Within this context, 5G is not a nice-to-have telco bandwidth upgrade; it is the essential bridge linking consumers and Industry 4.0 users to the next generation of transformative AI-enabled services and applications.
Nations with robust 5G infrastructure will have agency in the emerging global economy. Those that do not; will not.
Today I’m publishing a new FNTV Index to highlight which countries are getting 5G right, and which are jeopardizing their economies through under-investment in cutting-edge mobile networks. The FNTV Global 5G Index (2025) ranks nations based on actual 5G speed, availability, coverage, standalone (SA) deployment and infrastructure maturity.
It ranks the Top 25 5G nations, and I threw Palestine, North Korea and Sudan in for comparison purposes.
South Korea comes out on top. Yay.
China ranks second. Considering its vast size, this is a remarkable achievement.
The U.S. scrapes into the Top 10, barely, while Germany (15) and France (16) do not. The U.K. disgraces itself with a woeful 22nd (Rule Shitania).
Why are some countries surging ahead by developing ubiquitous 5G infrastructure, while others — including America, the wealthiest nation with the most advanced tech ecosystem — are falling behind? Weak spectrum policies, geographic size and ongoing carrier antipathy to 5G are partly to blame. However, a more serious issue is the same one that has inflated the current AI bubble: a focus on AI itself rather than its role as just one part of a much larger and more complex digital infrastructure strategy.
The current attention by investors and Western governments on AI data centers and chips in the network core misses the point entirely. These are merely the means of production — factories where AI is created. The product of AI is the revolutionary services and applications that AI enables. And guess what? They all live out at the edge of the network, where 5G holds dominion.
It is at the network’s edge where economic supremacy in the 21st century will be decided. This means the FNTV Global 5G Index not only measures mobile service quality but also indicates which nations are likely to rise or fall in the global economic hierarchy over the next decade.
Political Parameters
You can view the detailed methodology used in the FNTV Global 5G Index below, but stepping back from the detail, it’s clear that the defining factor in countries’ ability to incept a successful 5G (and, by extension, economic strategy) is political, not technological.
Half of the nations in the FNTV Global 5G Index are autocracies, not democracies, with the ability to craft clear infrastructure policies and implement them efficiently. Four are leading democracies, which is nice. Then there’s the U.S., a get-what-you-pay-for hybrid democracy/incompetency where most politicians seem more focused on following instructions written on the back of checks from AIPAC than doing their elected jobs. If you want to find a silver lining in all this, it is that President Trump’s autocratic ambitions — most recently demonstrated by wildly unconstitutional military interventions in America’s largest cities—could have one benefit: under his rule, the country might soon lose its democracy status, but at least its self-appointed overlord might ensure the 5G networks run on time.
For more of this kind of thing, click here.
Steve Saunders is a British-born communications analyst, investor and digital media entrepreneur with a career spanning decades.
FNTV Global 5G Index methodology
The FNTV Global 5G Index (2025) uses OpenAI’s Deep Research premium service to rank countries by the maturity and performance of their 5G networks, using a composite score (0–100) derived from five core criteria:
- Median 5G download speed – measured primarily from Speedtest Intelligence/Ookla data to capture the real-world performance of national networks.
- 5G availability – the percentage of time users are connected to 5G, using OpenSignal and equivalent crowd-sourced datasets.
- Coverage breadth – the extent of urban and rural 5G deployment, accounting for population reach and geographic equity.
- 5G standalone (SA) deployment – whether operators have transitioned from non-standalone (NSA) to SA cores, a key marker of network readiness for advanced industrial and ultra-low-latency applications.
- Infrastructure maturity – broader ecosystem indicators including spectrum allocation, operator investment, and progress on enterprise/private 5G.
Each country was assigned a composite score based on these factors, weighted toward availability and performance. Scores were normalized (0–100) and used to generate rankings. To reflect reality on the ground, adjustments were made where independent evidence contradicted published averages (e.g., Hungary and Poland showing stronger 5G adoption than early reports suggested).
The resulting Index highlights both leaders (nations with dense, high-speed, SA-ready networks) and laggards (countries with minimal or no 5G rollout). By emphasizing real-world performance over promotional claims, the Index provides a transparent, comparative framework for assessing national 5G progress.
FNTV Global 5G Index sources:
- Ookla Speedtest Intelligence – 5G median speed benchmarks (Q4 2024)
- Opensignal – Global 5G experience & availability reports
- GSMA Intelligence – 5G adoption and spectrum tracker
- Ericsson Mobility Report (Nov 2024) – Subscriptions and traffic forecasts
- Nokia Mobile Broadband Index – Country rollout readiness
- Huawei GCI – ICT readiness including 5G
- TeleGeography GlobalComms – Operator deployment database
- ITU WRC-23 / IMT-2020 – Global spectrum harmonization
- Regulators (FCC, Ofcom, MIIT, MSIT) – National spectrum and rollout data
- Industry press – Fierce Telecom, Light Reading, Mobile World Live, Telecoms.com
- Operator press releases – Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, Jio, etc.
About Deep Research
Deep Research operates in an orchestrated, multi-step, web-aware reasoning mode that trades speed for accuracy, comprehensiveness, and transparency of synthesis. It functions as a mixed-methods digital research framework, integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with iterative evidence synthesis. Through cycles of targeted web search, critical evaluation of heterogeneous data, and chained reasoning loops, the method refines hypotheses while maintaining provenance tracking and contradiction detection. By embedding explicit uncertainty modeling, Deep Research enables systematic triangulation across sources, mitigates bias, and establishes a transparent audit trail. This ensures methodological rigor, interpretive validity and reproducibility in complex, data-rich research environments. It also gets stuff wrong. So… that.