November 26 2024
By Minseo Kim
The Korea Telecommunications Industry Association, which represents the telecommunications industry in South Korea, researched the quality of cellular service abroad and compared it to the quality of the country's three major telecommunications companies. The results were surprising, as the average speed of fifth-generation cellular service(5G) in South Korea was found to be the fastest.
KTOA commissioned an agency specializing in quality measurement to test the speed of 5G in eight cities, including New York and San Francisco in the United States, and seven overseas countries, including Norway, Denmark, Germany, Singapore, Japan, and Canada. The results showed that Korea's three domestic telecom companies' average download speed of 939.14 Mbps (megabytes per second data transfer rate) was more than three times faster than the average of 331.21 Mbps in the seven countries.
A KTOA official explained, "Although the 5G quality level of the surveyed bureaus has improved a lot compared to the previous year, the quality deviation of each type of 5G measured was significant." "The quality of the subway in some cities was insufficient to the extent that it was impossible to use normal services," he said. “Korea's telecommunications industry is providing an optimal environment for innovative services to emerge even in the era of AI transformation,'” he added.
Meanwhile, KTOA's findings come as domestic consumers have been expressing dissatisfaction with 5G and complaining about quality. According to a recent survey of 1,200 domestic users by telecom equipment maker Ericsson's Ericsson Consumer Lab, only 14 percent of users said they were satisfied with 5G network performance so far this year, and 33 percent said they experienced 5G network problems in dense areas.