BELMONT, CA — November 18, 2025 — Exact Ventures recently published its 5G Packet Core Vendor Market Share and Total Market Analysis for 3Q 2025. Please note that we have recently added the Network Resource Function (NRF) to our quarterly accounting of the 5G SA market, retroactive to 1Q24. During the quarter the NRF market grew 37% versus 3Q24 but still accounts for a small percentage of the overall market. We expect the NRF to grow, 5G SA network smartphone traffic grows, as we discuss below.

In 3Q25, the total 5GC and EPC market decreased 11% sequentially but the market was up 16% year-over-year, however. The year-over-year growth was due to a 37% increase in 5G SA revenues and a 26% rise in 5G NSA revenues, which more than offset a 27% drop in 4G EPC sales. 

Sales growth of 5G SA core network functions has been slower than expected for several reasons: economic weakness putting pressure on operator business models and capex, a lack of compelling use-cases, barriers to deploying cloud-native infrastructure, and the time and expensive in adapting existing development and support processes to support 5G Standalone and cloud-native networks. But there are little alternatives to operators long-term. In order to keep their networks and related IT and BSS/OSS current, operators will need to eventually deploy 5G SA on cloud-native infrastructure, especially as 5G SA on cloud-native infrastructure will form the basis of 6G Core Networks and AI and Agentic AI efforts in the core network domain.

With lower-than-expected 3Q25 revenues, we have trimmed our full-year 2025 forecast for the 5G SA market. While 5G SA networks continue to launch, many are overlay networks that focus on specific use-cases like FWA or IoT or RedCap. The latest Apple Watch uses 5G RedCap, announced in 3Q25, and has been a catalyst for 5G SA network launches. Thus the 5G NSA core continues to carry the vast majority of the smartphone traffic. We expect that for the full-year 2025 the 5G NSA market will grow 9% to and that the 4G EPC market will decline by 23%. With the addition of NRF revenues, we now forecast that the total market will grow in the mid single digits in 2026 to reach $3.5 billion.