Note 03 · 14 min · 2020–26 · 5G
The 5G rollout, 2020 to 2026: NSA, SA, n78.
From the first non-standalone 5G cell on the island in January 2021 to the substantially standalone networks of late 2025 — five years of a transition that has, in the cities, reshaped the cell map.
Nicosia · December 2025
The Cyprus 5G rollout was a deliberate and slow one. The 3.5 GHz spectrum auction closed on the eighteenth of December 2020; the first non-standalone cells were activated on the eleventh of January 2021; the first standalone core went live in late 2023; the substantially standalone configurations of all three operators were in place by the end of 2025. Across that five-year period the cell count in the n78 band grew from forty-two to approximately one thousand one hundred — a twenty-six-fold increase — and the small-cell density in the principal urban centres grew from a baseline that was essentially zero.
The NSA stage — 2021 to 2023
The non-standalone (NSA) configuration is the simpler of the two 5G deployment options. The 5G radio runs on the n78 band; the control plane and the core network remain on the existing LTE infrastructure (EPC, evolved packet core). For the operator, NSA means: deploy 5G radio units (gNBs in 3GPP terminology) connected to the existing 4G base stations (eNBs), reuse the existing core, accept that some 5G features (notably network slicing and ultra-low-latency URLLC) are not available, and gain the bandwidth advantages of the wider 5G channels.
The Cyprus operators chose, in 2020–21, to start with NSA for sound operational reasons. The 5G core infrastructure was, at that time, less mature than the radio. The handset population that supported NSA was much larger than the population that supported SA. The migration from NSA to SA could be done band-by-band and site-by-site without service interruption. The NSA stage carried the network from January 2021 through to about the third quarter of 2023.
The SA transition — 2023 onwards
The standalone (SA) configuration is the architecture that the 3GPP specification was originally designed around. The 5G radio and the 5G core operate without dependency on the LTE infrastructure. Features that NSA cannot offer — network slicing, edge computing, URLLC, native 5G voice over new radio (VoNR) — become available. The operator gains the full flexibility of the 5G specification at the cost of operating two cores in parallel through the transition.
The first Cyprus SA core went live at one of the operators in the fourth quarter of 2023. The other two operators followed through 2024. By the end of 2025 all three operators were operating substantially in SA mode for the principal urban areas; NSA remained the default for the rural and the smaller-town sites, where the legacy 4G infrastructure was still the cost-efficient backbone.
The n78 band
The n78 band — 3.4 to 3.8 GHz — is the principal 5G band in Europe and is the band that carries almost all of the current Cyprus 5G traffic. The propagation characteristics are very different from the low bands described in note 02: a 3.5 GHz signal at 40 watts EIRP from a 25-metre rooftop will reach, on flat urban terrain with the modern massive-MIMO antenna arrays, a useful coverage radius of approximately five hundred metres to one kilometre. The band is therefore a capacity-and-not-coverage band — it is deployed where the demand is, in the urban and the high-traffic areas.
The 5G channel widths on n78 in Cyprus are typically 80 to 100 MHz per operator, which delivers, under good radio conditions, downlink throughputs in the high-hundreds-of-megabits-per-second range on a single handset, and aggregate cell throughputs in the multi-gigabits-per-second range when the massive-MIMO beamforming is in use.
Small cells and indoor systems
The small-cell programme — outdoor units mounted on lamp-posts, on traffic-signal poles, on building façades, at street level — has been the most visible change in the Nicosia and the Limassol cityscape over the past three years. A typical small cell is a sealed cubic enclosure approximately the size of a microwave oven, with an integrated antenna, a dedicated fibre backhaul, and a power feed from the host pole's lighting circuit. The density in the principal commercial streets of central Nicosia is now approximately one cell per two hundred metres.
Indoor 5G systems — distributed antenna systems (DAS) and integrated small-cell deployments inside large buildings — have followed a slower curve. The principal shopping centres, the airports, and the larger hotels have indoor 5G; most other buildings depend on outdoor-to-indoor penetration, which, at 3.5 GHz, is noticeably weaker than at the lower bands.
What is not deployed
The mmWave bands (24–28 GHz, the n257 and n258 bands in 3GPP terms) have not been deployed on the Cyprus networks. The European mmWave allocations are in place and the regulator has, in principle, the spectrum available, but no operator has, at the time of writing, launched a commercial mmWave service. The reasons are commercial rather than technical: the short range of mmWave (approximately a hundred and fifty metres in urban conditions), the cost of the additional infrastructure, and the limited handset support, have not yet aligned with a clear demand pattern on the island.
The 5G rollout is, in 2026, substantially complete in the cities and substantially in progress in the rural areas. The qualitative experience for a user on a modern handset in central Nicosia is now indistinguishable from the experience in a comparable Western European city.
What the rollout tells you
Three things, in my reading.
First, the NSA-to-SA transition is a quieter event than the marketing might suggest. The user on a 5G handset sees the same indicator, the same speeds, and the same coverage; what changes is the back-of-house architecture. The architectural change matters operationally — it is what enables the next generation of network features — but it is not, for the user, a perceptible switch-on.
Second, the small-cell programme is the more interesting story on the ground. The macro-cell map of Cyprus has, since 1995, been the dominant feature of the coverage geometry; the small-cell layer is the first piece of network infrastructure that has changed that geometry at street level.
Third, the rollout has been slower than the 2019 European policy timetable expected, and the regulator's quarterly bulletins have been honest about that fact. The reasons — supply-chain disruption, the cost of equipment, the slow handset population — are largely external to the operators' planning.
Researched from the Department of Electronic Communications quarterly 5G monitoring bulletins (Q1 2021 to Q4 2025), the operators' published rollout milestones, and field measurements taken on a 5G handset across central Nicosia and Limassol between June 2024 and November 2025.