How did Korea become the world’s first 5G company? The inside story of the three telecommunication companies that have become quiet

“Soon, the ‘5th generation (5G) standalone standard (SA)’ will be launched in almost all global markets except Africa.”

Market research company Dell Oro Group predicted that the transition to 5G SA is rapidly taking place in many parts of the world starting this year. The gist of this company’s report is that discussions and investments in 5G SA conversion are gaining momentum in the global mobile communications market. The exception is Korea. Most companies are stuck on ‘5G non-standalone mode (NSA),’ which is a technology at a previous stage than 5G SA. This means that Korea, which was the first to commercialize 5G technology, is falling behind in the next-generation communications competition.

○There is a lot of interest overseas… In Korea

View larger image According to the industry on the 18th, among the three domestic telecommunication companies, only one, KT, has built a 5G SA nationwide commercial network. SK Telecom and LG U+ are operating communication networks based on 5G NSA. Among these, SK Telecom introduced 5G SA on a limited basis to the SK Hynix factory for business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The industry points out that while the movement toward 5G SA is active in the global communications market, the domestic communications industry is overly quiet. According to the Global Telecommunications Suppliers Association (GSA), about 50 of the world’s 300 telecommunications companies that have commercialized 5G have established 5G SA. Counterpoint Research published a report stating that as of February this year, 55 telecommunication companies have commercialized 5G SA, and many other operators are in the testing stage.

5G SA is a technology that exclusively uses 5G for both base stations and core networks. Data transmission and reception and authentication and control signal processing all operate in the 5G network. The advantage is that the response speed is fast with ‘ultra-low delay’, which is a very short information transfer between terminals. The reason KT commercialized 5G SA in 2021 was because it believed that demand for ‘low power and low latency’ would increase further in self-driving cars and smart factories. On the other hand, NSA uses a combination of 5G and 4th generation mobile communications (LTE).

An industry official said, “Establishing 5G SA is essential to realize 5G Advanced, which is the step before moving to 6G.” 5G Advanced is a hyper-connectivity infrastructure technology that can be promoted after 5G SA is implemented.

○ “There is no immediate benefit”

Both SK Telecom and LG U+ agree that technical preparations for 5G SA transition have been completed. However, the common explanation of both companies is that the demand for SA in the domestic telecommunications market is not large, so they are in a wait-and-see phase.

Domestic communication networks have wider LTE coverage than 5G. It seems that there is no place in the country that does not have an LTE network. In this situation, the NSA method, which can use both 5G frequencies and LTE frequencies, is advantageous in terms of user-perceived speed. Not using the LTE frequencies allocated by spending trillions of won can also be a loss for telecommunication companies. An official from a telecommunications company said, “We don’t think there is a need to introduce 5G SA at the expense of lowering users’ perceived speed.”

Some point out that the government’s evaluation system, which encourages competition over ‘maximum transmission speed’, is a problem. Transmission speed is the most important indicator in the communication service quality evaluation conducted every year by the Ministry of Science and ICT. An industry official said, “No matter how next-generation technology is, it is difficult to pursue it while being disadvantaged in government evaluations.”

Reporter Jeong Ji-eun jeong@hankyung.com