The telecommunications industry has made unprecedented investments in 5G network infrastructure. In the US alone, cumulative investment has reached $275 billion, according to industry body CTIA. Globally, 5G infrastructure spending in 2024 hit $34.23 billion, while China plans to invest $184 billion by 2025. Yet despite this massive capital deployment, customer adoption remains measured, with 5G accounting for only 25% of global mobile connections by the end of 2025.
The technology, 5G NR (New Radio), works as designed from a functional perspective, but the business cases that justified these investments seem to have struggled to bridge the gap between technical capabilities and commercial appeal to date. This isn’t about shortcomings on the technological front. It is about the challenge of translating the potential of the 5G network into something customers are willing to pay for.
When Technical Excellence Meets Commercial Reality: A Real World Example
I experienced this challenge firsthand during a 5G deployment for a major UK mobile operator in the early rollout phase. We successfully launched a network based on 5G NSA (Non-Standalone) architecture, combining a 5G radio access network with the existing 4G LTE core network (Evolved Packet Core – EPC). Technically, the project was a huge success, and I remember joining the celebrations. We launched the network, tested a few phones, and saw download speeds of 300 to 500 Mbps. It was impressive, thanks to dual connectivity and the integration of 5G RAN with the 4G core, and helped us meet our initial 5G coverage targets.
Commercially, however, the project did not quite live up to the technical potential or the hype. At least not in the beginning.
The core issue was the lack of alignment between technical capabilities and commercial messaging. Marketing and product teams, eager to capitalise on 5G momentum, built financial projections around idealised peak and average speeds, using best case scenarios. In their defence, peak and average speeds and latencies were more or less all the information they had. The intricacies of high level network design or the differences between millimetre wave and mid band 5G frequencies did not make a meaningful impact on the messaging or financial models.
For example, a base station in a high capacity urban area might deliver 500 Mbps or more in download speeds to a handful of 5G devices, but performance in moderately congested areas was very different. Once more users with 5G devices began accessing the network, performance naturally declined due to spectrum and load constraints. Despite this reality, our commercial messaging and the underlying business case assumptions were built on theoretical limits rather than real world performance variability.
While we emphasised the full potential of 5G across all three use case categories, namely eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband), mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communication), and URLLC (Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication), the actual customer propositions focused solely on eMBB. And that reflects the technical reality of 5G NSA, where eMBB is the only meaningful differentiator.
Creating propositions around the next level enterprise capabilities such as mMTC and URLLC requires the ability to build targeted use cases for different market verticals. That demands a value based understanding of the network and the ability to link it to factors like 5G SA versus 5G NSA, spectrum availability for deployments, and power requirements for the devices.
This leads to a common business case challenge in today’s market: treating technical specification as commercial opportunity.
The Technical Factors Business Cases Often Struggle With
The fundamental challenge with telecom business cases is not a lack of financial sophistication. It is finding professionals who possess both strong technical and commercial understanding. Most organisations have people who are either technically strong or commercially sharp, but rarely both. Even when they do, staying current with the rapidly evolving technical landscape across 3GPP releases and network generations is enormously challenging.
This knowledge gap leads to shaky assumptions in business case development. Below are some of the technical factors that often distort financial projections:
End-to-End Solution Architecture Complexity
When creating a business case, teams typically start top down, identifying the business problem and then designing a solution. But once you are in solution territory, you must understand the key technical components involved. This means having a high level view of the network design and knowing which parts are essential to success.
Most mobile networks use equipment from multiple vendors. You might have your IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) from one supplier and your unified communications layer from another. If your high level design includes components from different vendors, each with their own costs, SLAs, and dependencies, all of that must be reflected in the business case.
The challenge is that vendor interactions are often driven by technology teams, not business teams. Product and commercial teams may participate in discussions but do not control procurement, vendor selection, or timing. This means vital components might be missed in business cases, or worse, unnecessary components might be purchased early without commercial alignment.
For example, if you buy an IMS platform but are not planning to launch VoLTE (Voice over LTE/4G) services for another two to three years, your costs are front loaded while revenues are delayed. This timing disconnect can undermine your business case credibility.
Spectrum Allocation and Timing Misalignment
Spectrum costs are often treated as strategic level considerations but are rarely understood or allocated correctly at the product level. The issue is not just the acquisition cost. It is about how spectrum is allocated within the organisation. Business cases often assume spectrum availability, but the reality is far more complex, especially for 5G which is service-driven.
Different frequency bands serve different use cases, and allocation decisions are typically made by network planning teams who optimise across the entire operator portfolio. This creates a lack of alignment. Business cases tend to assume spectrum usage from a use case perspective for their specific application, while network planning teams are balancing spectrum across multiple competing priorities, including performance and network load.
Multi-Vendor Integration Complexity
Integration complexity is often underestimated, both technically and from a resource and time perspective. It is not just about CAPEX. It is about rollout time, testing, dependencies, delays, and the impact on existing systems. When you are managing multiple vendor relationships across overlapping technology generations such as 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks and several network platforms, the integration challenges multiply significantly.
As business cases for key strategic priorities develop, they should evolve alongside the technical architecture. They should align with the high level design (HLD) and ideally not contradict the low level design (LLD) as it becomes available. However, in most cases, early stage business cases are built before real technical architecture exists. Once the funding is approved, the focus often shifts toward development.
The risk is that you may end up launching an initiative that was evaluated for commercial viability long before launch. By that time, market conditions may have changed, creating a significant risk that the business case may no longer deliver as planned.
Why 5G Is More Than Just the Next Step After 4G
While 5G is a natural evolution of 4G from a technical standpoint, it also represents a significant shift that demands a different commercial mindset. Yet in many organisations, business and marketing teams continue to approach 5G with a data centric mindset shaped by consumer and prosumer use cases, focusing largely on mobile internet, messaging, and content services, which makes it harder to fully explore 5G’s machine communication potential for industries, enterprises, and critical systems.
From 2G through 4G, mobile technology was heavily consumer driven. Each generation improved mobile data performance with faster speeds, better latency, and smoother streaming. The business model was straightforward: voice, messaging, and mobile data, all consumer centric. Even enterprise offerings often revolved around these same services, just packaged differently.
5G introduced three core use case categories, but only eMBB continues the consumer broadband legacy. The real differentiators, mMTC and URLLC, are machine communication focused and deeply aligned with enterprise and mission critical applications.
URLLC offers 99.99% reliability, the kind of performance needed for mission critical applications such as medical systems, industrial automation, and time critical factory environments. This level of guaranteed low latency performance is why Wi-Fi cannot compete in those use cases. mMTC enables massive IoT deployments with specific latency and reliability requirements that traditional connectivity simply cannot deliver.
However, instead of building commercial strategies around these high value enterprise capabilities, the industry has largely continued with a consumer marketing mindset, promoting 5G as faster mobile data and focusing on high speed mobile tariffs. This approach underplays 5G’s unique value proposition.
The critical technical distinction that business cases often struggle to fully capture is the difference between 5G NSA and 5G SA. Non Standalone 5G relies on 4G core network and does not deliver the full enterprise capabilities. True 5G, the version that enterprises actually need, requires Standalone architecture, which enables URLLC, mMTC, network slicing, and the broader service based architecture needed for industrial scale use. Unlocking the value of these capabilities is about building targeted propositions that align with the needs of specific market verticals and make full use of the network potential.
Understanding Technical Standards Without Overcomplicating Business Cases
Business teams do not need to become 3GPP documentation experts. That is neither realistic nor necessary. What they do need is a clear understanding of what features and capabilities are introduced in each release, what is commercially available, and how to map technical capabilities to market demand. In most organisations, there are business teams like product management and technology teams, and they need to work together to make this happen. Business teams must be mindful of the single source of truth on the capabilities front, namely 3GPP documentation, and must collaborate with technology teams to ensure that the translation of technical capabilities into business opportunities is not compromised by missing or misunderstood information.
The goal for business professionals is not to master technical documentation. It is to understand what they can actually productise and sell. What capabilities does a certain technoloyg standards release offer? What is available in the network versus what is supported by the device ecosystem? And where is the overlap?
Take LTE Advanced as an example. Business teams should be able to understand the commercial impact of capabilities like MIMO antenna configurations, in terms of what the network supports versus what devices support. If devices are capable of better performance than the network provides, then some of that potential remains underutilised. In other words, the commercial benefit exists, but it is limited by the network. On the other hand, if the network supports advanced capabilities but the devices do not, then that network value is left untapped. In both cases, commercial outcomes are directly affected.
This kind of release level understanding directly impacts the accuracy and credibility of business cases. If you do not know what features you are buying or what the network actually supports, your ROI calculations become weak because they are not based on the true potential of what is available. And given that most mobile networks are built using the same global standards in the 5G era, the real advantage comes from how effectively each operator translates those standards into business value. The risk is simple: if you miss that opportunity and your competitor does not, you lose ground. Being first to turn technical capabilities into targeted propositions is how commercial advantage is created in a highly standardised mobile network ecosystem.
As networks evolve toward service based architectures, business opportunity should lead technical implementation, not the other way around. Traditional mobile services like voice and data have become commoditised. The real revenue growth will come from strategic, use case driven services such as private 5G networks, fixed wireless access, and IoT based solutions. But to close the gap between technical investment and commercial impact, business cases need to be built around genuine opportunities that emerge from translating technical possibilities into practical, targeted propositions.
Building Realistic Business Cases for Complex Networks
The 5G investment experience offers crucial lessons for future telecom business case development:
Align technical capabilities with market readiness: Do not build business cases around theoretical performance or features that fall outside the relevant market window. Business cases should be grounded in technology that is actually available or imminently deployable, with performance levels that are realistically achievable in the target environment. Revenue forecasts must align with when those features will become commercially usable, and with market segments that are willing to pay for them.
Understand the difference between technical success and commercial viability: Networks can meet every technical specification and still underperform commercially if the business case assumptions were flawed. Technical teams optimise for performance and coverage; commercial teams must optimise for profitability, adoption, and timing. Bridging that gap is critical to success.
Account for multi vendor, multi generation complexity: Modern networks are not clean cut technical architectures. They are intricate combinations of platforms and equipment from multiple vendors across several network generations and inter-related technologies. Business cases must reflect the cost of integration, vendor dependencies, system interoperability, and the reality that ideal technical design rarely aligns perfectly with ideal commercial timing.
Treat business cases as living documents: Early stage business cases are built on assumptions, because detailed technical design does not exist at the outset. As architectural plans mature, those assumptions must be revisited. Business cases must evolve to reflect implementation complexity, realistic performance expectations, and confirmed delivery timelines. A business case is only as strong as its weakest assumption.
Ensure business and technical teams share understanding: The most challenging business cases arise when technical teams focus solely on feasibility and compliance, while commercial teams focus solely on opportunity and demand. Without integration between these perspectives, there is a risk of developing technically robust solutions that are commercially misaligned.
The Skills Gap That’s Costing the Industry Billions
The fundamental lesson from global 5G investment challenges is that successful telecom business cases require deep integration of technical and commercial expertise. Neither pure technical analysis nor pure market analysis is sufficient for complex infrastructure investments.
Technical teams understand what is possible but often underestimate commercial constraints and market timing. Commercial teams understand what is profitable but frequently overestimate technical capabilities and underestimate implementation complexity.
The solution is not about turning engineers into finance experts or expecting commercial teams to become network architects, though cross functional fluency certainly helps. The real solution lies in developing professionals who can bridge both domains effectively, translating technical capabilities into commercial opportunities while grounding business ambition in technical reality.
As networks become more complex and markets more sophisticated, the difference between projects that meet technical specifications and those that generate sustainable returns comes down to commercial discipline. The 5G experience shows that technical excellence alone does not guarantee investment success. What matters is a realistic understanding of when and where value can actually be realised.
The telecom industry has invested hundreds of billions in 5G infrastructure globally. Whether these investments deliver meaningful returns will depend not just on better business case documents, but on strategic decisions that link real market readiness to specific network capabilities. When commercial potential and technical execution are scaled in sync, investment impact improves. But if operators continue to overbuild ahead of demand, the cost of missed alignment will only grow.
Sources and References
- PwC – The state of 5G: Capturing more value from telecoms’ connectivity services
- Fortune Business Insights – 5G Infrastructure Market Size & Share | Industry Report 2030
- Business Wire – Corporate Training Strategic Business Report 2025
- GSMA – Faster Speeds and the Promise of New Use Cases is Driving 5G SA Adoption
If your organisation is investing in 5G or other complex technologies, your business cases need to reflect more than just technical ambition. They need to align performance capabilities with market timing, stakeholder expectations, and commercial viability.
That is exactly why I created the Business Case Builder and Business Case Fundamentals courses. These are designed to help product, strategy, and technology teams build credible, market ready business cases that stand up to scrutiny. Using a real world small cell example, the training walks you through the entire process step by step, with practical templates and clear logic you can apply immediately.
Whether you are planning new infrastructure, launching innovative services, or reworking an existing proposal, this training will help you turn technical potential into real commercial outcomes.
