- European operators are ramping up 5G standalone deployments, with progress highlighted at FutureNet World
- UK carriers Virgin Media O2 and BT are leading with enterprise-focused use cases including slicing and automation
- Rollouts remain uneven across the continent, with Italy taking a mixed approach to 5G SA adoption
European 5G standalone (5G SA) networks are starting to gain momentum at last, as became clear at last week’s FutureNet World show in London. Multiple telecom executives talked up the progress of their pure 5G networks in the context of the AI and automation event.
Jeanie York, CTO of Virgin Media O2 said the operator launched 5G SA network in February 2024, first switching on pure 5G in London, Manchester, Liverpool and other major cities in the United Kingdom.
Slicing was “the first real use case” and many of 5G SA use cases, like industrial automation, are driven by enterprise requirements, rather than consumer desires, she said.
“5G SA for BT is enabled for 28 million in the UK,” stated Sara Jones, mobile operations director at BT in another talk at the show last Wednesday. The total population of the UK is currently 68.5 million.
“Moving our core into the cloud was a challenge,” she noted. “In the UK, as you all know, we had a high-risk vendor we had to remove out of our core. It gave us the opportunity at that point to move into the cloud.”
She’s referencing BT removing Huawei equipment from its core. A project that started in 2020.
An Italian job
Andrea Calvi, head of technology innovation at TIM noted how different that operator’s approach had been, compared to operators in the UK and Western Europe. The Italian operator deployed a mix of 5G SA and non-SA. "The network is ready.” Calvi said. “It is live for [fixed wireless access] now.”
TIM is rolling out the new pure 5G SA architecture for new 5G applications, including automation, slicing and network exposure, she said.
So, much like the United States, 5G SA in Europe is rolling out in a disjointed fashion, with some operators seeing more opportunity than others.