By Joe Tan
When engineers talk about “5G and broadcast,” they are usually describing two very different things moving at very different speeds. One is the uplink: getting pictures out of the field and into the production chain. The other is the downlink: pushing finished channels directly to mobile devices.
In Asia-Pacific, the first is already arriving in newsrooms and at live events. The second is still, for the most part, waiting for the ecosystem around it to catch up.
The production side is where tangible progress is happening. The clearest illustration sits in Ericsson’s November 2025 Mobility Report. At the global sailing league SailGP, whose F50 catamarans race at up to 100km/h, teams now rely on a hybrid of private and public 5G to move telemetry, voice and broadcast video between boat and shore, using bonded modems that switch between networks for resilience.
At the Portsmouth event, organisers worked with BT and Sony to carry broadcast-quality video over a slice of the public 5G network — a live demonstration of connectivity standing in for dedicated links. The report is candid about the limits, too: holding ship-to-shore latency below 40 milliseconds still needs fine-tuning, and because licensed spectrum differs from market to market, no two deployments are quite the same.
The same move — away from dedicated satellite and fibre links towards production built on mobile and IP connectivity — is already underway inside broadcasters’ own operations, not just at showcase sporting events. “We are already moving in that direction,” Ng Thian Khoon, Head of Infrastructure and Service Operations (Technology) at Mediacorp, Singapore’s national broadcaster, told APB+. “Cloud production, remote production, IP transport and 5G contribution have significantly reduced dependence on satellite trucks and large on-site crews.”
The gains, he noted, are lowering operating costs, smaller field teams, faster deployment and the ability to cover events that might previously not have justified a full outside broadcast (OB) deployment.
Equally, there are drawbacks. Broadcasters, he said, traditionally designed infrastructure around certainty in the form of dedicated fibre, satellite and OB facilities that offer deterministic performance and known service levels. Connectivity-based production instead leans on telecommunication ecosystems, cloud and internet infrastructure that may not always be under the broadcaster’s direct control.
Rather than discarding dedicated infrastructure, he recommended a tiered model where the approach is dependent on the type of events to be covered. “The future is undoubtedly becoming more connectivity-driven, but for public service broadcasters, resilience will remain just as important as innovation,” Ng said.
Underpinning the production shift is a quieter change in the networks themselves: the maturing of 5G Standalone and network slicing, which lets operators guarantee a defined quality of service rather than simply sell data.
Ericsson noted that more than 90 operators have launched standalone networks and 65 commercial slicing-based services worldwide, with almost a third launched in 2025 alone. Singapore sits among the more advanced markets. Singtel, which made the country the first in the world to be fully covered by 5G Standalone back in 2022, now sells tiered “5G+” plans built on slicing — and Ericsson’s consumer research found one in three users in Singapore is willing to pay for assured performance.
The Ericsson report also flags that uplink is becoming “telecom’s new currency” as live production, AI and cloud all push more data upward.
If the production story is one of steady adoption, the delivery story is more cautious. 5G Broadcast — a one-to-many mode that sends live channels to phones without consuming network capacity for every additional viewer — promises to carry a core broadcast characteristic onto mobile. For a public broadcaster, that is precisely the appeal, and precisely why the bar is set so high.
“While 5G Broadcast has significant potential, it is not yet at a stage where it can universally replace terrestrial broadcasting,” Mediacorp’s Ng said. Terrestrial broadcasting’s advantage, he argued, is its proven ability to reach an entire population at once, regardless of audience size or network congestion.
During a national emergency or major live event, this is the quality that matters most when millions tune in simultaneously. 5G Broadcast is designed to preserve that one-to-many efficiency, which makes it attractive for public service announcements and emergency alerts. But for the foreseeable future, 5G Broadcast remains a complement to, and not replacement for terrestrial broadcasting.
What stands between promise and mainstream is not the core technology. Both Mediacorp and Ericsson point to the same bottleneck: devices.
Ericsson’s report tracks only a gradual build-out of 5G Standalone-capable and reduce-capability handsets, while Ng bluntly maintains that “the biggest issue is still handset support”.
While standards exist, not all smartphones are capable of receiving 5G broadcast services.
Beyond that, he listed four more unresolved hurdles:
- sustainable business models that align broadcasters, operators and manufacturers;
- long-term clarity on broadcast spectrum;
- content-rights frameworks built for terrestrial and streaming that must now account for direct-to-mobile, particularly for premium content, live sports and regional licensing; and
- unified workflows able to combine terrestrial, over-the-top (OTT), cloud and 5G in a single operating model.
Singapore, both Mediacorp and Ericsson say, is well placed to work through these questions. It has nationwide 5G, high smartphone penetration, a compact and sophisticated broadcast ecosystem and, as Ng puts it, “strong regulatory support for innovation.” Mediacorp has convened broadcasters and telcos before, in earlier mobile-TV initiatives, to test consumer adoption and operating models. “As broadcasters, technology providers and regulators continue to collaborate,” he said, “we believe the insights gained here can help inform how 5G Broadcast evolves, both within Singapore and across the region.”
The through-line, on both sides of the network, is convergence rather than conquest. In production, 5G and the cloud sit alongside fibre and satellite in a tiered model designed for resilience. In distribution, terrestrial, IP streaming and, eventually, 5G Broadcast look set to coexist, each carrying the traffic it handles best.
For an industry that has spent a decade being told one technology or another would sweep the rest away, the most useful question in 2026 is not which platform wins, but how they are combined. On the current evidence, the answer is arriving in the studio well before it reaches the phone.
