Monday Morning Impact – May 4
Omdia: Global Telecom Connectivity Revenues Grew in 2025
Omdia’s latest market update reveals that the global connectivity market spanning mobile, fixed broadband and fixed voice, reached $333bn in Q4 2025, representing a 5% year-on-year (YoY) growth. Full year revenues totaled $1.3 trillion in 2025, up 4% YoY growth. The results highlight ongoing challenges for the telecom industry which remains reliant on a slow growing core business while still working to establish new revenue streams.
“Overall, the 2025 results show that the telecom industry’s core business remains highly relevant, but is facing strong headwinds, including slow growth, while the sector has yet to realize meaningful returns from investments in new technologies,” said Ari Lopes, Omdia’s Practice Leader for Service Provider Markets.
5G continues its strong growth trajectory, reaching 3bn connections globally and growing 34% YoY. While still behind 4G, which stands at 8.3bn connections, 5G adoption is accelerating rapidly. Asia remains the largest market, accounting for 69% of global 5G connections.
Fixed broadband connections reached 1.6bn in 2025, with FTTx broadband continuing to dominate as the leading technology, surpassing 1.169bn connections, and growing 7% annually. In Q4 2025 India overtook the United States to become the leading 5G FWA market in the world, with 14.5m connections compared to 13.9m in the United States.
The global ranking of telecoms operators by connectivity revenues continues to be dominated by operators from the United States and China, which together account for eight out of the top ten positions. The remaining two operators are based in Japan.
Global CAPEX totaled $303bn in 2025. Although this represents a 2% year-on-year decline, it marks an improvement from the 3.5% decline recorded in 2024.
Channel Impact®
The data outline the headwinds experienced by this market segment, which has great bearing on adjacent sales opportunities.
AppDirect Acquires PartnerStack, Creating a Unified Subscription Commerce Platform
AppDirect, a Chicago-based company that offers a B2B subscription commerce platform, has acquired PartnerStack, a partner relationship management (PRM) provider.
This acquisition is intended to solidify AppDirect’s position in B2B distribution, building on its recent acquisition of Tackle.io, a cloud go-to-market platform supporting over $20 billion in cloud hyperscaler marketplace transactions. With Tackle’s marketplace-led growth and PartnerStack’s PRM and partner ecosystem, AppDirect sees itself as uniquely positioned to provide a full stack commerce platform for powering all direct and indirect go to market motions.
“With this acquisition, we’re at the center of the underlying infrastructure powering enterprise technology purchase decisions today,” said Nicolas Desmarais, CEO and chairman of AppDirect. “Navigating commerce and partner management requires a unified platform. By bringing these capabilities together, AppDirect is giving companies the foundation they need to scale through partners and win in an increasingly indirect, marketplace-driven world.”
“We are thrilled to further AppDirect’s position as the everything store for B2B distribution,” said Bryn Jones, CEO of PartnerStack. “Our network has driven over $3 billion in revenue for our customers and is increasingly relied on to help businesses show up in AI search. The primary driver of AI search visibility in platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini is third-party content, and PartnerStack is the largest B2B content partner network in the world. We are excited to connect our insights across hundreds of thousands of B2B customer signups every month with AppDirect and Tackle, creating powerful advantages for our partners and customers in the AI era.”
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Channel Impact®
The acquisition unites Partnerstack’s 138,000+ B2B partner network and PRM platform with AppDirect’s marketplace infrastructure, creating a single platform to launch, manage, and scale partner-led growth in an AI-driven economy. The combined company hopes to create a powerful partner ecosystem engine into the AppDirect subscription commerce platform, enhancing AppDirect’s ability to help companies leverage ecosystems and distribution as a primary growth engine.
Lumen Appoints Senior Vice President of Global Partner Solutions
Lumen Technologies has announced that Jim Ortbals will join the company as Senior Vice President of Global Partner Solutions (GPS). Ortbals will lead Lumen’s channel partner strategy and execution, with responsibility for strengthening how the company engages, enables, and scales outcomes through this critical part of its commercial approach.
“As we transform Lumen into the trusted network for AI, we need a partner ecosystem built for speed, rigor and scale,” said Lumen Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Sharritts. “Jim brings proven experience building and scaling global channel organizations, connecting commercial strategy to results. His leadership will help simplify our partner motions, sharpen execution, and accelerate growth by delivering better outcomes for enterprise customers.”
Ortbals brings more than 25 years of experience growing global channel and partner organizations across complex technology and services environments. He has held leadership roles at Cisco, VMware, Zscaler and others, with a track record of connecting channel partner strategy to operational rigor in support of customer outcomes.
“I’m excited to join Lumen at a time when enterprises are demanding tangible business outcomes and partners play an increasingly critical role in delivering them,” said Ortbals. “Lumen’s momentum and investments in our digital platform create a strong foundation for partner-led growth. My focus is to simplify and strengthen our channel partner motions so we consistently engage, enable, and support partners with operating rigor and clear accountability.”
Channel Impact®
The Denver-based company is undergoing a multi-year transformation, simplifying how it operates and modernizing its network and digital capabilities to meet rising demand for secure, scalable connectivity in the AI era. Partners are central to extending those capabilities to enterprise customers.
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