By the time most major operators hit 60-70% 5G population coverage, the uncomfortable conversation had already started internally: where’s the return? Spectrum auctions were expensive. Dense deployments in mmWave and mid-band are capital-intensive. And on the revenue side, most subscribers are still on 4G-era pricing with a “5G” badge in their status bar.
This isn’t a niche concern. It’s arguably the central challenge in telecom right now.
The capex math is brutal
The GSMA estimated global 5G capex would hit over $500 billion between 2020 and 2025. That’s before you factor in the ongoing costs of network densification, Open RAN integration, and backhaul upgrades. Operators in competitive markets US, South Korea, parts of Europe moved fast because they had to. But speed of rollout and return on investment aren’t the same thing.
Consumer ARPU hasn’t moved meaningfully. In most markets, operators are either competing on price or bundling 5G into existing plans to avoid churn. Neither of those generates incremental revenue from the new infrastructure. The “premium tier” consumer 5G play largely hasn’t materialized at scale.
Where revenue is actually showing up
The clearer ROI signals are in enterprise and private network deployments. Manufacturers running smart factory pilots, ports automating container logistics, healthcare systems running connected device networks these are verticals where operators are landing real contracts with real margins.
Private 5G is a particularly interesting case. Some operators are deploying neutral-host or operator-managed private networks as a managed service, which has a fundamentally different margin profile than consumer connectivity. The challenge is that private 5G also invites competition from system integrators and hyperscalers who are perfectly happy to deploy private networks without the operator being in the value chain at all.
Winning the enterprise segment requires more than coverage it requires the right commercial and billing infrastructure. If you can’t offer a contract with an SLA attached to specific performance parameters, you’re not a serious enterprise connectivity provider. You’re just a pipe. Optiva’s BSS platform and Amdocs’ monetization stack both have components built specifically for this — handling the complexity of enterprise-grade SLAs, custom charging models, and multi-service billing that consumer-focused BSS wasn’t designed for.
The monetization infrastructure gap is real
Here’s a consistent pattern across operators that are struggling with 5G ROI: their monetization infrastructure is lagging their network infrastructure. They’ve upgraded the RAN. They’ve deployed SA cores in some markets. But they’re still billing on legacy systems that can’t express the new value they’re trying to deliver.
You can’t sell a network slice without a billing system that understands what a slice is, can rate it in real time, and can enforce SLA-based credits when performance degrades. You can’t offer developer APIs for network capabilities if your policy and charging systems operate in batch mode.
MATRIXX Software has been pretty explicit about this being the gap they’re targeting real-time charging and policy control that can handle the velocity and complexity of 5G service models. Telgoo5 is another name that comes up in this space, particularly for operators looking for cloud-native BSS that doesn’t require a multi-year transformation program to get to 5G-ready monetization. The operators that close this gap first are going to have a meaningful commercial advantage.
Open RAN economics: promise vs. reality
A lot of the 5G ROI conversation gets tied up in Open RAN as a cost reduction strategy the idea being that disaggregation and multi-vendor interoperability would lower equipment costs and reduce dependency on Ericsson/Nokia/Huawei. The reality has been messier.
Open RAN deployments have generally cost more in the early phases due to integration complexity, higher power consumption compared to integrated RAN solutions, and the need for significant systems integration work. Rakuten, Dish, and some operators in emerging markets have pushed ahead, and there are real learnings there. But for most incumbent operators, Open RAN is a medium-term cost play, not a short-term one. The ROI timeline keeps shifting right.
TelcoEdge Inc. is one of the vendors working in the edge/Open RAN adjacent space, helping operators actually operationalize edge deployments and tie them to enterprise use cases which is where the revenue side of the Open RAN bet has to eventually land. Edge computing and slicing as a combined product for vertical markets is a more credible ROI story than Open RAN cost savings alone.
What operators in different markets are dealing with
This is genuinely regional. In markets like South Korea and Japan, where enterprise digitization is further along and there’s strong government alignment on Industry 4.0 use cases, operators are seeing better early returns from enterprise 5G. In markets where the enterprise sales cycle is slower, or where spectrum costs ate more of the capex budget, the returns timeline looks a lot longer.
There’s also the competitive pressure variable. In markets with strong MVNOs or where a fourth operator disrupts pricing (India is the clearest example), even consumer revenue from 5G gets compressed before operators have recovered rollout costs.
What actually needs to change
A few things stand out as genuinely actionable:
First, operators need to stop treating 5G revenue like it will follow automatically from coverage. It won’t. The commercial model products, pricing, SLAs, API exposure needs as much investment as the network.
Second, enterprise sales motions need to be rebuilt. Most telecom enterprise teams were built to sell connectivity. Selling a managed private network, or a slice with an SLA, or an API for network capability access, requires a different sales profile, different pre-sales engineering, and different contract structures.
Third, the vendor ecosystem matters. Operators who’ve modernized their BSS to platforms capable of dynamic charging, real-time policy, and flexible product configuration have a clear commercial edge. Those still running 15-year-old billing systems are going to keep struggling to package the new stuff cleanly.
What’s working in your market?
Genuinely curious what operators and engineers in the TelecomHall community are seeing on the ground. Are enterprise verticals actually converting to revenue in your region? Have you seen specific use cases private networks, slicing, edge + 5G combos where the ROI case is actually holding up? Drop it in the comments. The variance across markets is significant enough that the real learning is in the specifics, not the global averages.