构成南亚的八个国家的规模，经济和技术权力差异很大：来自不丹的小内锁王国，人口少于100万和24亿美元的GDP到印度，到达14亿和GPD的印度2.6万亿美元。
但是他们的5G进展与他们的规模和经济能力不符。两个最小的国家 - 布丹和马尔代夫都有5G商业服务。最大的两个印度和巴基斯坦尚未获得完整的5G服务。在这些国家和其他国家 /地区，向5G频谱运营商分配和分配正在推迟服务介绍。
阿富汗5G
鉴于2021年塔利班接管和随后的禁运在阿富汗经济的偏执状态，阿富汗没有5G服务并不令人惊讶。
但是，基础工作已经奠定。In April 2021, before the country fell to the Taliban, Parallel Wireless, a US-based developer of Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) systems, teamed up with Afghani mobile operator Etisalat Afghanistan to deploy what Parallel Wireless claimed would be “the world’s first cloud-native ORAN-compliant … solution … [and] the world’s first network architecture that unifies all mobile connectivity standards—2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G—under the same software and cloud-native umbrella.” Intel and Supermicro were also involved in the project. Parallel Wireless said the network would be upgradeable to support 5G, and it said Afghanistan’s wireless broadband penetration had reached 22% in 2019.