5G Standalone: The 5G upgrade the channel’s been waiting for

Time to read

5 minutes

Author

Paul O’Neill, Head of Wholesale Mobile
and Channel Partnerships at Giacom

Date published

September 2026

5G Standalone is changing what mobile connectivity can do for businesses.
Paul O’Neill, Head of Wholesale Mobile and Channel Partnerships at Giacom, looks at why the shift matters to MSPs and resellers, from faster site deployment and greater resilience to opportunities across cloud, security and managed services.

For a long time, the role of mobile data in business connectivity has been fairly easy to define. It keeps employees connected away from the office, gets a temporary site online quickly, or provides a useful fallback when the main connection goes down.

The question now is whether that definition is becoming too narrow.

Mobile has become much more important to the way businesses operate. Smartphones are increasingly powerful, effectively becoming the PC in your pocket. Business applications have been designed around mobile use, and one BT survey found that 59% of SMB leaders rated mobile phones as their top technology for running operations, ahead of laptops and desktops. With around 40% of the UK workforce also working on a hybrid basis, reliable mobile connectivity is becoming a fundamental part of the working experience.

At the same time, the technology underneath that connection is changing. While many people are aware of 4G and 5G, there’s a mobile data evolution underway – and it’s not 6G. 5G Standalone (5GSA) is an important step forward because, unlike earlier 5G services that continued to rely partly on 4G infrastructure, it uses 5G technology end to end.

The major mobile networks have their own names for 5GSA, such as 5G+ or 5G Ultra, but customers aren’t likely to won’t care much about the label. They’ll care about what it enables. Lower latency, improved reliability and speed, improved battery life and better coverage can create a more consistent connection for the applications and services they increasingly need to access wherever work happens.

That matters because there are situations where the old distinction between fixed connectivity and mobile backup is becoming less useful.

A temporary office, construction site or pop-up location might need to be connected long before a fixed service can be installed. A small or remote site might not justify the cost or complexity of traditional infrastructure. Other businesses may want an independent route into cloud applications and systems so that a fixed-line outage doesn’t bring work to a halt.

In those situations, mobile doesn’t necessarily have to be the second choice.

That isn’t to suggest broadband and Ethernet are about to disappear. They’ll remain the right answer for many customers and workloads. What’s changing is the range of credible options available when deciding how best to keep a customer connected.

5GSA is transforming mobile from a backup connection into a credible business-grade primary connectivity platform. With lower latency, higher reliability, improved coverage and future capabilities such as network slicing, MSPs can create new recurring revenue streams across connectivity, security, IoT, managed services and Microsoft cloud solutions.

The same applies to employees themselves. Microsoft 365, Teams and countless other business applications are increasingly designed to work seamlessly on mobile devices. As handsets have become more capable, the smartphone has effectively become another business computing device rather than simply a phone.

For providers, that creates an opportunity to look at connectivity through the experience the customer is trying to achieve rather than the connection type they’ve historically bought. Where do people need to work? Which applications matter most? How quickly does a new location need to be connected? What happens if the primary service fails?

The answer might be broadband, Ethernet, mobile or, increasingly, a combination of them.

5GSA also points towards what may come next. Network slicing, for example, can allow sections of a 5G network to be configured around different performance requirements. It’s still a developing and relatively complex area, so it’s unlikely to feature in most everyday SMB conversations just yet. But it shows how mobile is evolving towards services that can support different business needs rather than simply providing a generic data connection.

There’s an opportunity here for resellers and MSPs, but taking advantage of it is easier said than done. Mobile comes with different networks, tariffs, technologies and commercial models, and building expertise in a new area takes time. For providers with limited resources, the potential return has to justify the effort involved.

That’s why the support around the service matters as much as access to the network itself.

Standard 5GSA is available through Giacom across EE, O2 and Vodafone, giving providers the flexibility to choose the right network for different customer requirements. But we don’t expect partners to simply take the product and work the rest out for themselves.

Our Mobile Partner Enablement team can help providers build the knowledge and confidence to take mobile to market, from training sales teams to identifying whitespace within an existing customer base. When an opportunity needs more specialist input, the team can also work alongside the provider to help qualify it, shape the proposition and support the sales conversation. That’s particularly valuable for MSPs moving into mobile for the first time, where the opportunity may be significant but the expertise might not already exist in-house.

And there’s plenty of room for the channel to play a bigger role.

5GSA transforms mobile connectivity for businesses, making smartphones, sites, devices and cloud-connected services more reliable and responsive.

The opportunity isn’t simply to sell a newer generation of connectivity. It’s to recognise where faster deployment, greater resilience and the freedom to work from more places can create a better outcome for the customer, and then have the capability and support to turn that into a service that works commercially too.

5G Standalone and the channel opportunity

For MSPs and resellers, 5G Standalone broadens the role mobile can play within a customer’s technology strategy. Giacom partners can access 5GSA services across EE, O2 and Vodafone, alongside support from the Mobile Partner Enablement team to help identify and develop opportunities.