Exploring a customer-centric 5G standalone rollout strategy

BT Group sought to take advantage of its strong market position and unique network assets in the UK, leading outdoor coverage with 5G standalone (SA), and leading indoor connectivity with Wi-Fi 7 providing millions of public-Wi-Fi hotspots nationwide. It is no longer good enough simply to have a connection; BT Group’s customers want high-quality and reliable connectivity that empowers them to live, work and play the way they want. This mindset of always focusing on building the best network experiences is reflected in BT Group’s mobile network brand, EE, being ranked first in the UK based on external benchmarks by a third party for the last 11 years.[1]

BT Group had clear expectations for the performance benefits it wanted to deliver for its customers with the launch of 5G SA. These included improved latency and voice quality, enhanced reliability and capacity, stronger indoor coverage in specific locations, and enhanced network security. Beyond combined fixed and mobile packages, BT Group is exploring new ways to utilize 5G SA, Wi-Fi 7 and public hotspots to create a smarter and more seamless connected experience for its customers.

Experience-centric launch strategy

With customer experience at the heart of this launch, demanding performance benchmarks were set to ensure a consistent, reliable and enhanced network experience from day one. This threshold was to deliver more than 95 percent outdoor coverage in every 5G SA location before announcing the launch. To deliver on this ambition – building a 5G SA network capable of delivering a meaningful experience for BT Group’s customers and showing the true value of 5G – there have been several key steps beyond just the establishment of the core network. Building a converged cloud core, which enables the flexibility and scalability needed to deliver new 5G SA use cases, was the starting point. This was complemented with carrier aggregation across mid- and low-bands running on the majority of sites. By the end of March 2025, the 5G SA network was live and available to over 28 million people across 50 major towns and cities in the UK, covering more than 40 percent of the population. This met the goal of delivering over 95 percent outdoor coverage, ensuring the benefits of 5G SA could be experienced consistently and reliably.

Measurable improvements

As part of the strategy to deliver measurable improvements, six frequency carriers were made available in locations where 5G SA was launched, and carrier aggregation was utilized across most sites. The launch was purposely timed to coincide with wider availability of 5G SA-enabled devices, to ensure increased accessibility to the network upgrades. This ensured more users’ next-generation handsets experienced a notable performance improvement, even in busy locations like train stations and major stadiums. In advance of the launch, BT Group secured strong partnerships with major brands so that its customers would get the best network experience on leading, high-end devices and applications.

Carrier aggregation is an important technique for ensuring reliability and high performance as upload demand continues to increase. Trials to deliver two-carrier uplink on a live 5G SA network are now bearing fruit in the real world, and customers using the latest devices are benefiting from better mobile experiences. Ultimately, 5G SA in combination with carrier aggregation will deliver on the true potential of 5G, by offering greater security, reliability and capacity. This is especially true in busy areas and during peak times, so consumers can get the quality of experience they want.

As illustrated in Figure 17, BT Group’s phase one 5G SA deployments were in 15 of the UK’s most populous cities. These cities have large numbers of potential customers who could be provided with high-end devices and a variety of high-quality services, enhanced by the dense 5G SA network. Subsequently, a clustering strategy has been used in phases two and three to build out into the surrounding cities and towns, with the goal to drive uptake of 5G SA and high-end devices to improve the user experience. The 5G SA network has reached over 40 percent population coverage as of March 2025.

Following the network investments, 5G SA is now marketed within EE’s service packages with the latest devices, including advertised speeds of up to 10 times faster than 4G. However, this has not been the positioning with the launch strategy; the focus has been on improved user experiences in crowded places and highlighting the uplink benefits alongside faster speeds.

EE wanted to learn from the industry challenges experienced during the initial 5G launches, where consumer expectations were not met due to spotty coverage. The network deployment based on the 95 percent population coverage in launch cities, linked with the experience-centric go-to-market strategy, ensured that customer expectations and network capabilities were aligned. The network was monitored closely in the months following the launch, and showed it was able to maintain a high and stable Net Promoter Score (NPS) of around 8 out of 10, for both reliability and speed.

Enhancing experience

Demand for faster uplink speeds is growing in importance as more people want to live-stream content, game online, have video calls and use real-time applications. The network is not only enhancing experiences for consumers, but also supporting businesses with dependable connectivity and empowering them with digital transformation projects. These benefits are enabled by both the performance gains in the network and new capabilities like network slicing, where service providers can create multiple levels of connectivity services using the same infrastructure, to provide deterministic connectivity matched to application requirements.

During the festive period in Northern Ireland, network slicing was utilized for Belfast’s Christmas Market to provide predictable and reliable connectivity for payment terminals. As Belfast’s oldest family-owned pub, Lavery’s has been at the heart of the city’s social life for over 100 years, and the Belfast Christmas Market has been one of the most important dates in its diary for two decades. The Lavery’s beer tent is among the most popular attractions, and with 1.2 million yearly visitors to the market, reliable, fast mobile payments are crucial.

The connected stadium

The cup final weekend in May is the conclusion of the English football season for both the men’s and women’s game. This year, the connectivity in Wembley stadium was taken to a new level with 5G SA. Supported by enhanced connectivity, the network saw an increase in 5G traffic of around 31 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, reaching in excess of 2.3 TB of data. The proportion of uplink traffic was around 23 percent across both games, with uplink traffic growing by around 46 percent. This illustrates the growing importance of uplink and the need to dimension networks differently to cater for the changing needs to ensure an enhanced consumer experience is delivered. Beyond the enhanced user experience, network slicing was also explored at the venue to test its capabilities, such as cameras on the mascot children that walk out with the players, which provided the parents with connectivity for a closer experience. These tests and activities are part of a bigger picture for being able to apply the necessary connectivity to support the operations of events and enhance the visitor experience.

Enabling new experience

Building the 5G SA network is not only about enhancing user experience today, but it is also about building a foundation of BT Group’s next-generation, AI-powered network to ensure greater responsiveness and help future devices deliver the best performance. 5G SA will be the bedrock of the next generation of connected experiences. Its ultra-low latency, increased capacity and enhanced security is delivering a more reliable performance for customers today, but it is also serving as a platform for new services and capabilities, to meet the needs of future services and applications.

Network investment is critical for BT Group, because it believes the future will be about more than just providing the fastest and most reliable connectivity experiences. It will be about delivering network performance that empowers its customers to do more with the next generation of devices and applications. One example is Gen AI, with major device manufacturers launching new smartphones with built-in AI applications and smart glasses being on the horizon. As these services evolve, the network will be what underpins the superfast and seamless connections to the cloud for enabling the best personal AI experiences. The ambition is to build a network that is programmable with the ability to ensure network resources can be allocated where and when they are needed on-demand, to respond to the needs of new and emerging applications. Network APIs will play a role in exposing the network capabilities to customers via APIs to support the development and enhancement of both existing and new applications.