According to Yonhap News Agency, an assessment report from South Korea’s Ministry of ICT shows that South Korea’s 5G network services are not as good as expected, and the download speed and network connection stability are far below the level claimed by telecom operators.
South Korea announced the launch of 5G commercial services in April last year, but 5G users have been complaining that the speed of the 5G network is much lower than expected and the network connection is also unstable .
According to this report from the Ministry of ICT, South Korea’s three telecom operators, SK Telecom, KT, and LG U+, have an average download speed of 656.6 Mbps on the 5G network, which is only faster than 4G LTE’s 158.5 Mbps. The average speed is 3 times faster.
Previously, Korea Telecom and LG U+ both claimed that their 5G network data speed is 20 times faster than 4G LTE network.
The report also found that when downloading on the 5G network, the 4G LTE network was used on average about 6% of the time. South Korea’s 5G network currently uses the NSA model that relies on 4G core networks.
The report shows that smartphone users’ accessibility to 5G networks hovered below 70%.
This result is based on tests conducted on 3,826 public buildings with 5G equipment installed by three telecom operators nationwide.
From the perspective of telecom operators, SK Telecom has the fastest download speed, reaching 788.97Mbps; Korea Telecom (652.1Mbps) and LG U+ (528.6Mbps) are behind.
Hong Jin-bae, Director of the Telecommunications Policy Bureau of the Ministry of ICT of South Korea, said in a briefing: “There are still many places, including indoor environments, that have not been covered by (5G) networks. We hope that telecom operators will work quickly to ensure that the network quality meets expectations. “
In the past year, three South Korean operators have competed to upgrade and deploy networks nationwide.
Their goal is to launch a commercial 5G SA network before the end of this year, and they have pledged to invest up to 25.7 trillion won (US$21.6 billion) to build a nationwide 5G network by 2022.
The large-scale investment plans of telecom operators keep pace with the South Korean government’s digital New Deal plan, which plans to spend 58.2 trillion won to upgrade digital services in public infrastructure by 2025 and increase national investment in key technologies.
According to data from South Korea’s Ministry of ICT, as of the end of May 2020, the number of 5G users in South Korea reached 6.9 million, accounting for about 10% of the country’s 69 million mobile users.
As of February this year, 108,897 5G base stations have been deployed nationwide in South Korea. For comparison, the number of 4G LTE base stations deployed is approximately 870,000.
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