Ericsson: 5G is the Critical Infrastructure Where Europe Still Has Its Champions

Ericsson Celebrates 150 Years

Ericsson marks its 150th anniversary, a rare milestone in the technology sector, where the history of companies is usually measured in decades, not centuries. The anniversary coincided with the release of the latest semiannual Mobility Report, a study on the evolution of mobile networks that has become a reference for operators, analysts, and competitors over the years. Andrea Missori, President and CEO of Ericsson Italy and head of the Southern Europe and Eurasia area, presented the data in a press meeting in Milan, emphasizing a specific thesis: mobile networks have ceased to be an accessory service and have become the infrastructure on which economic competitiveness and the stability of national systems rely.

Three Billion Subscriptions and the Era of Uplink

The most significant finding from the report is the surpassing of the three billion threshold of 5G subscriptions worldwide, reaching 3.1 billion: 660 million were added in 2025 alone, with another 162 million in the first three months of 2026. Ericsson predicts that by the end of 2031, the total will reach 6.4 billion, more than double today. Already, almost half of mobile data traffic travels over 5G networks, a share that is expected to rise to 85% by 2031. This adoption curve, in terms of speed, is positioned just behind that of AI, with a significant difference: accessing AI requires any internet connection, while 5G needs physical infrastructure, antennas, and compatible devices.

On this point, Missori introduces a distinction he considers crucial: the difference between declared 5G and true 5G. The first generation of technology, non-standalone, still relies on the 4G network and is essentially little more than accelerated 4G. Standalone 5G, built on a completely new architecture, enables the distinctive characteristics of the technology: ultra-low latency, greater resilience, and above all, the ability to differentiate connectivity, reserving a portion of the network with guaranteed quality for each type of user or application. This is particularly valuable for businesses—small, medium, and large—more so than for individual users. The examples Missori provides are deliberately concrete: the dedicated lane that keeps POS payments functioning when a stadium is packed, or the reserved bandwidth that allows cameras to transmit during a crowded event. This is a rapidly growing market: commercial offers based on this type of connectivity have increased by almost one-third in six months, globally rising from 65 to 84.

The finding that Missori indicates as the most significant pertains to the direction of the traffic. For thirty years, mobile networks have been designed asymmetrically, with far more capacity dedicated to download than upload: the assumption was that users primarily downloaded videos, which still account for 75% of overall traffic today. The arrival of AI on devices is reversing this balance. The cameras of autonomous vehicles, the sensors of robots, and augmented reality headsets do not download data; they generate vast amounts in the opposite direction, towards the network. This is what the report defines as the era of uplink. Missori illustrates this with the image of a highway built with eight lanes in one direction and only one, thin lane in the opposite. In Italy, the phenomenon is already visible: according to the AGCOM Observatory, between 2023 and 2025, uplink traffic grew by 68%, almost double the 36% recorded for downlink. Ericsson estimates that by 2031, uplink could triple and, in scenarios of deeper AI adoption, reach five times the current levels.

The Three Technologies of the Decade

Missori places 5G within a broader framework of three technologies that he believes define this decade: cloud, artificial intelligence, and 5G. These should not be understood separately, as they are closely interconnected. The cloud distributes information from the center to the periphery, 5G is the infrastructure that allows devices, edge, and core to communicate, and AI is moving rapidly from large data centers to endpoints. In the report, Ericsson's Chief Technology Officer, Erik Ekudden, writes that the next transition will take us into the world of physical AI, with robots, vehicles, and urban environments hosting connected autonomous agents via 5G. This scenario will require networks that are much more capacious than those built so far. There is also the reverse movement, which AI performs for networks: Ericsson, which has been developing machine learning techniques long before the concept of AI was popularized, has entrusted AI with spectrum optimization, the scarcest and most expensive resource for any mobile operator, achieving results in a fraction of the time it would take a team of engineers in a year.

The issue, in Missori's view, is that Europe arrives unprepared for this transition. Standalone 5G covers between 5% and 6% of European users, compared to peaks of 85% in the United States and 95% in China, while India has skipped a generation to accelerate. In Italy, the lag is even more pronounced: approximately 30% of radios have been upgraded to 5G, compared to well over 60% in Nordic countries, and the first operator to launch a standalone service was WindTre at the end of 2025, utilizing Ericsson technology. Italian operators have spent about €6.5 billion on 5G frequencies, the highest cost in Europe, and now use them only minimally.

Behind this delay lies a structural problem that Missori has been highlighting for years and which he reiterated in discussions with the journalists present, including those from Edge9. Telecommunications, he noted, are the only commodity in systematic deflation: in Italy, the average service price has dropped over the last fifteen years, while all other utilities have increased. A market marked by fierce competition and an excess number of operators for its size does not generate sufficient returns to sustain investments, as evidenced by the sale of Telecom Italia's fixed network, Vodafone's exit from direct management, and the merger between Wind and H3G. The result, he summarized, is that operators have stopped investing. The prescriptions he offers, looking to examples of those who have reversed the trend like India, the UK, and Greece, involve market consolidation, a review of frequency costs tied to coverage obligations rather than immediate outlays, recognition of tariff adjustments for inflation, and public investments in the major state verticals—from defense and public safety to railways and energy.

There is also a regulatory knot that hinders network differentiation. The principle of net neutrality, established in the United States to protect small operators, is applied in Europe with a rigidity that hampers slicing, i.e., the creation of differentiated quality services on the same infrastructure. In the United States, an operator like T-Mobile already manages dozens of differentiated services in parallel, whereas in Europe, Missori observed, there is still debate over whether slicing is feasible. The Italian model requires the operator to launch the service and only then obtain authorization, an order that discourages investment; the proposal is to reverse this towards a preventive approval. The difference policy choices make is illustrated by Greece, a dispersed geography with complicated orography like Italy, which with three operators and only two networks has activated standalone 5G, launched premium fixed radio access services, and seen average revenues per user increase.

A Strategic Matter of Security

What makes the matter strategic, and not just industrial, is the theme of security. Telecommunications are no longer just a support for processes of businesses and administrations; they have become the process itself: this is how electrical networks, public safety, and defense are managed. To illustrate what it means to depend on this infrastructure, Missori recalled a personal experience: when Russian forces disabled Kyivstar in Ukraine, for three days not a single SIM functioned in the country, leaving those in need of an ambulance, checking bank accounts, or operating defense machinery without a network. It was Ericsson, with its Ukrainian staff, that rebuilt the network. The ensuing question, he explained, concerns not just protection from a cyberattack but trust in those who build and manage that infrastructure.

The Field of Champions

It is within this framework that Missori places his central argument regarding European positioning. Of the three technologies of the decade, Europe has effectively lost the cloud, where it is difficult to envision building a hyperscaler capable of competing with the American and Chinese blocks, and it is trailing in AI, where there are also experiments like Mistral, but with investments that are one or two orders of magnitude lower. 5G is the only field in which the continent retains technological leadership: the main mobile network providers are two Europeans, Ericsson and the Finnish Nokia, and two Chinese. The United States, Missori noted, has already chosen Ericsson as its preferred provider, effectively treating it as a domestic champion due to its personnel, research centers, and facilities on the territory.

"The only field where we have control from a technological standpoint is 5G," summarized Missori. The paradox, he noted, is that these European champions exist, but in Europe, they do not receive the same recognition and support that the United States affords Ericsson in its market.

The paradox, in his view, is that Europe risks losing this last prime position not due to a technological delay, but due to a lack of choices. Network infrastructures last decades and need to be built now, while 6G, which will largely rely on today's 5G, is expected around 2030. For a company celebrating 150 years and investing $5 billion each year in research and development, the message to Italy and Europe is that a competitive advantage accumulated over a century and a half must be defended by acting in the coming months, not in the coming years.