5G+ icon on your phone: what it means and who gets it

What is 5G+?

5G+ is the commercial name for 5G SA (Stand Alone). Orange and then Movistar launched it in 2023, to set it apart from the 5G NSA that carriers rolled out first. NSA leans partly on 4G infrastructure, while SA is 5G from end to end.

You may well have been on it already. Phones simply never told the two apart and always displayed '5G'. Now the new badge shows when an end-to-end 5G connection is in use.

Who gets the 5G+ icon?

First, you need a line with Movistar, O2 or Orange. Those are the only three carriers offering 5G+ in Spain. Telefónica extended it to O2 a few months after Movistar's launch, and nobody has followed. Vodafone has switched it on only in some regions, and other Orange brands don't have it. Movistar and O2 have shown the icon for a few weeks, and Orange has just started.

Second, you need an approved handset (not all are) running software that displays the icon. On iPhone that means iOS 27, released in September. On Android it is appearing on updated devices, including some recent Samsung models with One UI 9.0 and some from Xiaomi, Motorola, OPPO, OnePlus and Google Pixel. The rest should follow gradually.

Is 5G+ better?

With SA, both the radio access network and the network core are built specifically for 5G. That enables features such as network slicing, which splits a network into dedicated slices for different uses.

The advantages listed are lower response times for real-time apps, more efficient handling of data traffic, better behaviour in crowded places and support for millions of connected devices at once.