South Korea extended its lead in the world league for 5G penetration with 12.87m subscribers at the end of January 2021, after a net addition of almost 1m over that month, driven by booming sales of the latest Samsung Galaxy S21 smartphones. Operators expect the surge to continue at a slightly reduced pace over the rest of the year to reach almost 18m by the end.
Leading MNO SK Telecom would top this list at 9m 5G subs by then, followed by LG Uplus on 4m and KT on around 3.8m. The mobile subs total stood at 70.7m at the end of January, with 4G subscriptions at 51.9m now falling, down by 660,000 over just the one month from December. By contrast, 4G sub numbers are still rising in many countries, and in some such as India will continue to do so for several more years.
China, as is widely reported, has by far the largest number of 5G subscribers at 160m, discounting those who are still accessing via 4G phones and therefore do not derive extra benefit, or very little. This is 10% of the total 1.6bn subs, which as in South Korea exceeds the total population in number because some people have multiple contracts, or defunct ones.
In South Korea the 5G proportion is significantly higher at 18.2%, with an even greater disparity in terms of base stations deployed. While China has 700,000 5G base stations, 80% of the world’s total and one for every 2000 people, South Korea has around 130,000, or one for every 400 people, five times the density.
While such figures may seem rather meaningless, they indicate the determination of those two countries to forge ahead with 5G deployment, matched only among major nations to any extent at all by the US and UK in terms of adoption, along with a handful of smaller countries like Switzerland, Kuwait and Finland.
Yet in just about all these countries, cracks appear upon closer scrutiny of performance and user experience. In the case of China, we may recall how in October 2020 Ryan Ding, head of Huawei’s carrier business, was scathing about his country’s 5G, calling the experience “fake, dumb and poor”. He may have been indulging in a little poetic licence, but he insisted that many users even with 5G phones were still only obtaining 4G experience, often being out of coverage. He suggested that average downlink rate on China’s 5G networks was 270Mbps, compared with 600Mbps in South Korea.
But this does not quite concord with observations made by London-based mobile analytics firm OpenSignal at around that time, which found that in Q3 2020 the average 5G download speed in South Korea was 336Mbps, not much higher than China and far below the rate promised. Furthermore, users were only able to connect to a 5G network 22.4% of the time, with availability chiefly confined to the Seoul region and six metropolitan cities.
This picture is common to all countries and also inevitable, given that service billed as 5G can only economically and practically be provided in more remote areas, which are extensive in China and the USA. It is only small densely populated island or city states, such as Hong Kong or Singapore, where very high performance 5G can be available almost everywhere.