5G Commercialisation in Southeast Asia: Lessons From the Region’s First Launch

Every operator in Southeast Asia making 5G commercialisation decisions right now is working from first principles. There is no established regional playbook. The technology is mature; the commercial model for most operators is not.

I am in a specific position to write about this. Pritam Dutta led the commercial launch of Southeast Asia’s first commercial 5G network at M1 Limited in Singapore in 2020 — the first operator in the region to launch both NSA (Non-Standalone) and SA (Standalone) 5G under commercial conditions. What follows are the five commercial lessons from that deployment that apply to every operator in the region now making the same decisions.

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Lesson 1: The Consumer 5G Revenue Question Is the Wrong Question

Every board conversation about 5G commercialisation starts with consumer ARPU uplift. If we offer 5G to our postpaid base, how much more will they pay? The honest answer, based on the M1 Singapore experience and every major operator launch since, is: not much. Certainly not enough to justify the infrastructure investment on consumer revenue alone.

This is not a failure of the technology. It is a structural characteristic of mature consumer mobile markets. The consumer is already paying for connectivity. They do not experience 5G as a categorically different product — they experience it as faster. Faster is good. Faster does not, by itself, command a significant price premium in a competitive market.

The commercial implication is significant: the 5G business case must be built on enterprise revenue, not consumer ARPU uplift. The consumer launch validates the network. The enterprise pipeline funds the business case. Operators who approach 5G commercialisation primarily as a consumer proposition are building on the wrong foundation.

Lesson 2: NSA and SA Are Not the Same Commercial Decision

Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G uses the existing 4G core network with 5G radio added on top. Standalone (SA) 5G runs on a full 5G core — network slicing, ultra-low latency, and the enterprise capabilities that actually justify the business case.

Most operators launch NSA first because it is faster and less capital-intensive. That is the right technical decision. The commercial mistake is treating NSA as the destination rather than the stepping stone. NSA 5G cannot deliver network slicing. It cannot deliver the guaranteed latency that enterprise IoT and private network use cases require. Selling enterprise 5G solutions on an NSA network is selling a promise the network cannot keep.

At M1 Singapore in 2020, we ran NSA and SA launches under accelerated regulatory timelines — the regulator had set an aggressive coverage schedule that compressed what would normally be an 18-month sequence. That acceleration forced clarity: the enterprise commercial strategy had to be built around SA capabilities from the beginning, not retrofitted after NSA launch. The lesson is to plan the SA migration and enterprise commercial model before the NSA launch, not after it. M1’s 5G NSA network launched commercially on 24 September 2020. The 5G Standalone network launched on 27 July 2021, becoming Singapore’s first cloud-native 5G SA deployment.

Lesson 3: Enterprise 5G Requires a Different Sales Organisation

Most telecom operators have consumer sales organisations that are very good at selling to millions of individual subscribers. Most have enterprise sales teams that are reasonable at selling corporate mobile plans, internet connectivity, and managed services. Neither of these is equipped to sell enterprise 5G.

Enterprise 5G sales involves use cases that cross multiple industry verticals — manufacturing, logistics, ports, healthcare, smart campus — with buying committees that include IT directors, operations leads, and C-suite sponsors. The sales cycle is 6–18 months. The deal structure involves customised service-level agreements, network slicing specifications, and integration with third-party IoT platforms. The commercial motion is closer to infrastructure selling than telecoms selling.

The operators who are winning in enterprise 5G have built or hired dedicated enterprise 5G sales teams — separate from the standard enterprise connectivity team — with industry vertical specialisation and solution engineering capability. This is a significant commercial investment that needs to be planned before the network is live, not after the first enterprise conversations go nowhere.

Lesson 4: The Pricing Architecture for 5G Enterprise Is Still Being Invented

There is no established pricing playbook for 5G enterprise services in Southeast Asia. Every operator is figuring this out in real time, which creates both risk and opportunity.

The risk is pricing too low in the early stages, establishing a market rate that undervalues the service and is hard to raise. The opportunity is that operators who develop a clear, defensible enterprise 5G pricing architecture early — before the market becomes more competitive — can establish price anchors that benefit them for years.

The variables that drive enterprise 5G pricing are: guaranteed throughput and latency (network slicing parameters), coverage area and exclusivity, integration support and SLA, and the value of the use case enabled. A 5G private network for a port that handles SGD 2 billion of cargo annually is worth more than a standard enterprise internet connection — the pricing should reflect that value, not the cost of the radio equipment.

Lesson 5: The Board Question Is Always Commercial, Not Technical

In every board conversation about 5G at M1 Singapore, the technical questions were asked once and answered. The questions that came back in every subsequent meeting were commercial: When does this generate revenue? What is the enterprise pipeline? Which verticals are we prioritising and why? What does the payback model look like across 24 months?

This is the reality for every operator’s board. They approved the network investment. They need to understand the commercial return timeline. The commercial leader’s job — whether that is a fractional CCO or a full-time CCO — is to have a board-ready commercial narrative that goes beyond coverage milestones and subscriber numbers into enterprise pipeline value, vertical prioritisation, and revenue trajectory.

Operators who cannot answer the commercial question with specificity — not optimism, specificity — find that board conversations become increasingly difficult, and the 5G business case comes under pressure before the enterprise revenue has had time to build.

What This Means for Operators Making 5G Decisions Now

Southeast Asia’s 5G rollouts are at different stages across markets. Singapore’s operators are into commercial deployment. Malaysia is accelerating. The Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia are building commercial momentum. Cambodia and Vietnam are at earlier stages.

Wherever your operator is in the 5G journey, the commercial lessons from the M1 Singapore 2020 experience apply:

• Build the enterprise commercial model before NSA launch, not after. The SA transition and enterprise sales investment need to be in plan, not in discovery, when the network goes live.
• Price enterprise 5G on value, not on cost. The operators who commoditise 5G enterprise pricing early will spend a decade trying to recover margin.
• Build a dedicated enterprise 5G sales team or access one fractionally. The standard enterprise connectivity team is not equipped for the enterprise 5G sales motion.
• Prepare the board commercial narrative now. Not for the next board meeting — for the next 24 months of board conversations about whether the 5G investment is producing the promised commercial return.