By: Dario Betti

Ninety‑seven percent of UK premises now sit inside a 5G footprint. That headline from Ofcom’s Connected Nations report is impressive in its own right, but the real significance lies beneath the surface. The UK has crossed a structural tipping point: mobile connectivity is now sufficiently deep, dense, and reliable that an IP connection can be assumed for almost every citizen, most of the time, both indoors and out. That single shift fundamentally reshapes how voice and, more importantly, messaging will work for the rest of this decade.

For years, mobile service design began with an apology. Could the user get coverage? Would data drop? Should we fall back to SMS just in case? In 2025, those questions stopped being central (or at least less topical). The new reality is not about reach, but about quality: how fast, how rich, how deep in the building, how trusted mobile data interactions can become.

To understand what comes next, it helps to look separately at mobile networks and mobile services, before stitching them back together into a picture of where messaging is heading for operators, CPaaS providers, enterprise brands, and public services across the UK.

A network layer that has quietly matured

When Ofcom’s engineers re‑ran nationwide drive tests in 2025, the results confirmed something many users already feel intuitively. Fourth‑generation coverage remains almost universal, with around 96 percent of the UK landmass covered and up to 99 percent of premises enjoying usable indoor signal in urban areas. More striking, however, was the leap in 5G availability. Coverage outside premises rose to 97 percent, while 5G Standalone coverage surged from just over half of the country to more than 80 percent in a single year.

This matters because Standalone 5G is not simply a faster radio. It introduces a new core architecture with lower latency, more predictable uplink performance, and the foundations for network slicing and exposure of network capabilities through APIs. In other words, it is the difference between “best effort” connectivity and connectivity that can be shaped to the needs of a specific service or interaction.

By mid‑2025, total mobile data traffic passed 1.25 exabytes, an 18 percent year‑on‑year increase. The growth, however, is uneven. While 4G still carries the majority of traffic and remains the workhorse of the network, 5G traffic is growing at more than twice the overall rate. Nearly a third of all 5G data already runs over Standalone cores, and that share continues to rise as handsets and tariffs catch up with network capability.

For service designers, this creates a clear design principle. Experiences must still work flawlessly on 4G, because it remains ubiquitous, but they should increasingly be optimised for 5G Standalone. An interaction that feels instantaneous and fluid on SA will degrade gracefully on 4G. One that is constrained by 4G assumptions will never take advantage of what the newer network can deliver.

The quiet end of the coverage excuse

One of the most profound changes in the UK market is the slow disappearance of “coverage anxiety”. Even when Ofcom applies stricter signal thresholds in its Map Your Mobile tool, almost nine‑tenths of the landmass qualifies as good coverage. Where the macro‑network signal is weak, other layers now compensate. Wi‑Fi Calling has become routine rather than exceptional, carrying close to a fifth of all voice minutes. At the same time, more than 30,000 neutral‑host and shared indoor sites, from stadiums to shopping centres and office buildings, now handle over a fifth of all mobile data.

The practical effect is that many everyday moments that once broke digital journeys no longer do so. Signing up to a service in a shopping mall, completing a payment in a basement café, or resolving an issue with customer care inside a large office building has become far more reliable. That reliability is what allows messaging to move from a notification channel to a genuine transactional and conversational interface.

Legacy networks: the countdown is starting

If 5G’s rise is the optimistic part of the story, the retirement of 2G and 3G is the forcing function. For the first time, all UK operators have published firm sunset dates. The earliest switch‑offs begin in 2029, and by the early 2030s circuit‑switched voice will disappear entirely.