What India can learn from South Korea on 5G

On December 1, 2018, South Korea became the first country to roll out 5G network for businesses. Four months later, the country rolled out 5G services for the larger population.

Since then, South Korea has added more than 16 million 5G subscribers - 23% of its total mobile subscriptions. 5G is set to add at least $30 billion to the country's economy by 2025. 

However, the impact of 5G has been more than these numbers. 5G helped South Korea save several lives during the pandemic. An example would be SK Telecom's AI-driven system at Incheon International Airport that checks passengers without masks or with COVID-19 symptoms. 

Also Read: Apple aims to debut low cost 5G iPhone in March: Report

The system sends out autonomous robots for disinfection. To operate this service, SK Telecom installed millimeter wave (mmWave) band 5G base stations at the airport. 

Apart from this, 5G has become centrepieces to South Korea's recovery strategy from COVID-19. Industries like transportation, defense and healthcare are set to be 5G driven. 

An interesting thing to note here is South Korea is the second least impacted country by COVID-19. The economy shrunk only 1% as compared to many other countries. 

Clearly, lessons lie in how communications technologies can be leveraged to not only boost the economy but also control the damage when a crisis arises. 

South Korea also laid out a perfect roadmap in rolling out 5G. The best practices right from setting up the technology infrastructure to creating a great policy and collaboration ecosystem are worth taking note of. Let us look at the things other 5G aspirant countries can learn from South Korea.  

Build dense fibre networks 

For 5G to grow and flourish, high-capacity fibre networks are more than a necessity. South Korea's 5G network is powered by its universal fibre network that has existed in the country for years now.

Nearly 70% of the towers in South Korea have been fiberised, allowing South Korea to leapfrog ahead of many economies in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

This fibre infrastructure is capable of being upgraded at low costs to substantially higher speeds. Moreover, the infrastructure sharing policies reduced the cost of deployment and level the playfield for the three telecom giants in the country. 

Also Read: Why India should take a cautious approach towards the 5G rollout

Invest in Open technologies 

South Korea has always been one of the biggest advocates of open technology. In fact, many South Korean vendors were the founding members of O-RAN Alliance, a consortium working towards promoting open and intelligent RAN.

In June last year, South Korea established its first Open RAN private and public alliance by the name of "open 5G fronthaul working group (WG)". More than 23 organisations came together to develop and commercialise the open fronthaul interface developed by the O-RAN Alliance. 

Create a conducive policy roadmap 

The South Korean government has always been bullish in establishing the country as the 5G leader. The 5G strategy was unveiled in January 2014 with an initial investment of $1.5 billion. At that time, 4G accounted for less than 15% of all worldwide cellular subscriptions.

South Korean government's support for 5G has only grown since then. They auctioned the 5G spectrum for just over $3 billion, much less compared to many countries. 

Moreover, the government ministries and legislative bodies in the country have come together to eliminate the potential barriers to 5G development. Tax incentives were provided for developers, budgets were allocated for rollouts, infrastructure policies were introduced among others.

The government prepared a shared deployment model that helped the three major telcos of the country to achieve faster deployment and split the deployment costs, resulting in $1 billion in savings over ten years.  

In 2021, the South Korean government has set aside a budget of 165 billion won ($140 million) to increase the 5G coverage in the country.

It will provide expanded support for local businesses to transition to the ultra-fast networks, investments in research and development of mobile edge computing among others. 

Establish a collaborative ecosystem 

South Korea's 5G ecosystem brought together government ministries, legislative bodies, carriers, private sector vendors, research institutes and other stakeholders such as trade unions, civil society groups at the very early stages of the 5G buildout.

This led to an environment of cooperation and tremendous technology breakthroughs and cost benefits. Future technologies were tested in an evolved beta market, technology standards were established and a strong market adoption strategy was created well in advance of the commercialisation.

It also helped stakeholders to mitigate the risk of research and development through the funding and contribution of other alliance members. 

Promote 5G and its use cases 

While deployment is an important step in 5G development, making your target audience understand its promise is another thing. The opinions on practical use cases for 5G in the short term have been different.

There is a need to promote the technology and its benefits. 

In that view, operators in South Korea introduced 5G-powered services to fuel the demand for the technology. Each operator offered unique content and experience use cases. Some of them included: 

• South Korean Telecom's TReal and eSpace platforms where baseball fans can access real-time data and stats by pointing their smartphone camera at a baseball player. They can point a VR headset at the field and watch the game from eight different angles. 
• LG U+ Idol Live that allows K-Pop fans to enjoy a concert as they would do in a real theatre. 
• South Korean Telecom's 5G-AI Machine Vision, a smart factory solution that uploads high-resolution, multi-angle photos to a cloud server via a 5G router, instantly identifying defective products on a conveyor belt. 

Applications like these have spiked the data consumption in the country and led to increased average revenue per user (ARPU). These numbers are only going to increase as the 5G use cases mature. 

To sum it up, if 5G were an Olympic, South Korea would have been Michael Phelps. Over the last four years, South Korea has done everything that is required to make the country a 5G first mover and a leader. 

While there is some way to go before South Korea envelopes the country with 5G, it surely details out the roadmap on how 5G should be deployed and commercialised.

Before 5G aspiring nations try to cover their 5G blackspots and join the bandwagon, all they need to do is look at what South Korea did. 

(The author is CMO, STL.)