Table of Contents
According to the GSMA, NaaS is already a $16.5 billion market, with Europe in the lead — a baseline that underscores real enterprise demand
The GSMA’s Head of Network, Henry Calvert, has been closely following the evolution of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), and in the latest episode of Unmuted, he explained that this offering is changing how enterprises access mobile networks, making it easier to connect to the capabilities introduced by newer generations of mobile technology. The shift from 4G to 5G brought a move to service-based architectures, aligning mobile networks more closely with cloud-native enterprise workloads built around programmable compute and storage.
“And I see NaaS actually now getting to that ability of being able to provide programmable connectivity, which has got to be one of the other fundamental accesses for an enterprise,” he said. “They want reliable storage. They want the best compute. And they want to be able to have the best and most reliable connectivity, so [that] their virtualized services can perform best for their customers.”
According to the GSMA, NaaS is already a $16.5 billion market, with Europe in the lead — a baseline that underscores real enterprise demand, even as longer-term forecasts project global revenues reaching $250–$270 billion. Calvert noted that this outlook is being driven by early large-scale deployments, particularly in China, where China Telecom has piloted network APIs with tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of calls through services like Quality on Demand to improve uplink and downlink performance. Rapid digitalization efforts across Asia-Pacific — especially in China and India — are also accelerating demand, as smart city initiatives and AI workloads place new requirements on mobile network capabilities.
“At the moment, they’re very contained within the data centers,” he said. “But at some point, the richness of information that is going to be required, ultimately, is going to come from devices. And those devices are either smartphones or they might be IoT devices, or there might be a new type of headsets and glasses.” This, he continued, is going to fuel the need for programmable networks and the NaaS that sits behind it.
Large enterprises currently account for the majority of NaaS adoption, but broader enterprise uptake — particularly among SMBs — remains limited, with many organizations still viewing NaaS as experimental. One of the biggest barriers is simple awareness: many CIOs don’t yet realize these capabilities exist, or that they’ve matured to a point where they’re flexible, usable, and worth investing in. “We have to build confidence and trust with CIOs that they can actually get the reach they need [and] that [it] is simple for them to use,” said Calvert.
Beyond that, familiar challenges apply, including standardization, organizational inertia, and uncertainty around ROI. Ultimately, adoption hinges on trust — confidence that enterprises can achieve the reach they need through offerings that are straightforward to use, supported by clear commercial models around pricing, terms, and conditions.
Historically, telecom has taken an “inside-out” approach to enterprise services — building offerings first and expecting demand to follow. Increasingly, said Calvert, the focus is shifting to an “outside-in” model, where enterprises clearly signal what they need, where they need it, and when.
Making that work requires simplicity in the middle layer, where enterprises engage with operators and, critically, channel partners. According to Calvert, these partners play a central role in translating enterprise needs into consumable services, while emerging industry efforts are also working to simplify access through single entry points for APIs across hundreds of operators globally. The overarching goal is to reduce complexity, amplify the enterprise voice, and make network capabilities as easy to consume as other programmable IT resources.
Ultimately, Calvert suggested that for NaaS to move beyond early adopters, simplicity — not just technology — will determine whether programmable networks become a core element of enterprise IT.
