Surveying Key Wireless and RF Trends for 2025
Steve Douglas, Head of Market Strategy, Spirent Communications

2024 may be in the rearview mirror, but it’s left wireless and RF stakeholders with no shortage of questions: How will regulators and industry respond to the growing risk of outages in critical systems? What about the threat of electronic warfare tactics disrupting commercial industries? And what’s next for 5G? Are there key parts of the 5G story that have yet to be told?

As one of the world’s leading test and assurance providers, we work with organizations across the wireless ecosystem—chipset makers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), telecoms, and many others. As a result, we get an inside perspective on the industry’s top concerns and priorities, and a sneak preview of what’s coming. Based on hundreds of customer engagements conducted last year, here are the top trends we’re following in 2025.

Regulators will align around new standards for operational resilience. 

The global economy has never been more dependent on information and communications technology (ICT), and that dependence elevates risk. In the last few years, major outages have affected mission-critical systems in diverse industries including telecom, banking, transportation, and energy. Whether due to cyberattacks, aging ICT systems, or failed network updates, these problems continue cause massive disruption. This year, expect heightened focus from regulators and industry groups on operational resilience planning and testing in multiple industries.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), for example, which strengthens rules for European financial institutions, came into full effect in January. Regulators will also seek to strengthen existing standards, especially around positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems in light of mounting signal interference threats (see next section).  

These trends will place intense pressure on organizations to conduct more exhaustive and continuous operational resilience assessments, which will in turn drive an increase in testing automation to help maintain compliance and reduce risk. More organizations will also seek to strengthen continuous testing (CT) elements of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to enable more agile and iterative testing.    

Navigation warfare (NAVWAR) will continue spreading beyond the battlefield. 

One of the most urgent threats to the resilience of critical systems is the growing use of GPS jamming and spoofing around military conflicts. As uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) play a larger role in these conflicts, combatants are increasingly targeting GPS/GNSS signals, either to disrupt navigation or make aircraft believe they are in a different location. The effects of such tactics, however, increasingly extend much farther, disrupting many civil and commercial applications as well.

Such threats are particularly urgent in commercial aviation, where GPS/GNSS spoofing now affects hundreds of flights daily. Yet many other industries are also at risk. GNSS and other PNT technologies are now employed in a wide variety of systems and applications, including financial networks, land surveying, search and rescue, and dozens more. This year, look for governments and regulators to sharpen their focus on GPS/GNSS vulnerabilities and explore new operational resilience standards.   

 Developers and integrators will make greater use of GNSS data to mitigate threats.

As industry stakeholders work to address PNT signal vulnerabilities, many will find help in a familiar place: GPS/GNSS chipsets themselves. PNT chipmakers tend to be ahead of the curve in technology development, and existing GPS/GNSS chipsets can already provide a wealth of information that could help detect attacks, much of which is not currently being utilized. By reading more of this information into their systems and building new logic to take advantage of it, system developers and integrators can make major strides in protecting against vulnerabilities. For instance, if a system detects that a GPS satellite signal is stronger than it should be based on the reported elevation angle of the transmitting satellite, it’s likely that signal is being spoofed. Look for more OEMs and integrators to take advantage of these types of techniques to bolster system resiliency—even without adding new hardware.

 PNT developers will “shift left” with model-based engineering.

DevOps practitioners have long championed “shifting left”—conducting more expansive testing earlier in development—to accelerate software releases. This year, expect advances in software modeling to push more developers of PNT systems to adopt this approach. Using highly realistic simulation tools and model-based engineering, developers can now explore a much wider range of questions about how devices will perform in real-world operation via software.

These advantages will bring significant benefits. Developers can identify more issues earlier in the product lifecycle when they’re less expensive to address, and reduce iterative hardware testing. Lifelike early-stage modeling can provide the foundation for more effective RF testing later. And chipmakers and OEMs can accelerate time to market in the fast-paced PNT ecosystem.

 5G will gain significant momentum as it enters its second half. 

This year, 5G reaches the conceptual midpoint of its 10-year release cycle. Given operators’ struggles to monetize 5G investments, and relatively sluggish 5G investment in 2024, it’s fair to ask what to expect from here. In fact, based on work we’re engaged in across diverse telecom markets, we expect to see significant 5G activity and investment in 2025.

It’s important to remember that 5G was never intended to be a monolithic technology update but rather a series of iterative releases, with each adding new features and functionality. Now, many operators are launching major new initiatives to take advantage of the advanced capabilities that recent releases have unlocked. These include:

  • New Internet of Things (IoT) services, especially for industrial customers, that will take advantage of new Reduced Capabilities (RedCap) technology support in a growing number of devices and 5G networks
  • New 5G-Advanced implementations, especially in Asian and Middle Eastern markets, that will use new capabilities in 3GPP Release 18 to better support targeted vertical industries and AI
  • New 5G Standalone (5G SA) commercial upgrades as telcos conclude vendor selection and begin rolling out services that feature new capabilities enabled by 3GPP Releases 16 and 17

5G investment may have slowed in 2024, but the reality is that many of the most powerful and differentiated capabilities—especially those targeting industrial and enterprise customers—have only recently become available. This year, we expect major momentum as telcos and other 5G stakeholders look to take full advantage.