Türkiye’s 5G rollout drives record telecom investments at $5.6 billion in Q1

Rapid adoption of 5G and massive fiber-optic expansion drives whopping 1,300% year-on-year investment spike, says Turkish transport and infrastructure minister

Türkiye’s investments in electronic communications reached a record 263 billion Turkish lira ($5.6 billion) in the first quarter of the year, marking a whopping 1,300% surge year-on-year, driven by the recent 5G auction fees and subsequent rollout, Türkiye's Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Abdulkadir Uraloglu said. Uraloglu stated that the 5G network’s launch on April 1, following the service auction in October 2025, saw nationwide subscriptions surpass 43 million, with operators expanding the fiber-optic networks by 12.8% to meet the demand for high-speed and low-latency connectivity. Uraloglu said Türkiye’s total fiber-optic cable length rose from 618,000 kilometers (384,007.4 miles) in the first quarter of 2025 to 697,000 kilometers (433,095.7 miles), adding that it was “enough to circle the Earth some 17 times.” Türkiye’s overall broadband Internet subscriber base reached 99.5 million people with fiber subscriptions seeing a sector-leading growth of 29.2%. Uraloglu stated that the mobile market also remained strong with around 86 million individual subscribers and 12.3 million machine-to-machine connections. He said mobile users generated around 71.8 billion minutes of total call traffic, compared to the 1.3 billion minutes on fixed networks. Türkiye continued to record Europe's highest average monthly mobile call duration at 439 minutes per subscriber. He added that market mobility remained strong with around 3.5 million mobile subscribers porting their phone numbers between GSM operators.