Brazil may end 2025 with more than 60 million 5G
 |
Brazil ended 2024 with 40.0 million 5G cell phones, a growth of 95% and net additions of 19.5 million mobile accesses in the year. If current trends continue, Brazil is likely end 2025 counting more than 60 million 5G cell phones.
Vivo became the leader in 5G mobile accesses in June/24, surpassing Claro. It led net additions in 2024 (8.5 million), followed by Claro (6.0 million) and TIM (4.9 million).
 |
This result reflects the market share scenario of cell phones total, in which Vivo leads with a market share of 38.8%, followed by Claro (33.1%) and TIM (23.6%). They have a larger market share in 5G due to the fact that regional operators and MVNOs are still incipient in this technology. Brisanet ended the year with 95 thousand 5G cell phones and Unifique with 23 thousand.
Despite being significant, growth in 2024 was lower than expected if the growth curve for 5G cell phones continued to surpass that of 4G, when comparing to the months after the launch in Brazil, which didn't happen.
 |
Smartphones price contributed to this smaller growth, mainly among prepaid clients.
 |
Although 5G networks in Brazil are among the fastest in the world, the availability, which is understood as the proportion of time a user is connected to 5G, was still around 13% in January 2025 (OpenSignal). For availability to increase, it's necessary to make lower frequencies such as 600 and 700 MHz available for 5G.
5G mobile phones presented an averaged of 1.6 million net additions per month in 2024, peaking at 2.4 million net additions in Aug/24 and ending the year with 1.9 million additions.
 |
You could ask:
