Broadband South Korea: a pioneer 5G

Broadband Society is evolving. On April 3, 2019, South Korea commercialized 5G for the first time in the world. This was the gateway to the 5G era, and it was a monument to Korea’s success in preempting the title of ‘world’s first commercialization of 5G’ among the big countries like China and the United States. 

With its fast-paced commercialization of 5G, a key mobile factor in the Broadband Society, Korea has dominated the world's largest 5G subscriber base among the giant countries. Thirty years ago, it was inconceivable that Korea would take the top spot against the United States and China. How was Korea able to achieve rapid growth in IT industry? We analyze it with Min Kyung Kim, from UPF.

Korea is one of the most prominent countries in the field of IT, broadband industry. According to the statistics of OECD, Korea has consistently topped the list in the field of ‘Internet access’ Since 2005. 99.5% of Korean people have access to the internet as of 2018. And for the ‘Households with broadband access’ field, Korean is maintain no.1 ranking. For the field of ‘Fixed broadband subscriptions’, Korea has ranked in 6th since 2012. In many countries during the past century, the development of broadband has been driven by the state. Among them, Korea has been a leader in the broadband deployment since 2000. Since the late 1990s, South Korea began building a broadband infrastructure, and has since achieved great success today after several policies.

The first policy for Korea’s development of broadband was ‘Cyber Korea 21’, which began in 1999. It began with the aim of overcoming the Asian economic crisis and turning the nation's economy into knowledge-based. From then on, Korea began to have national broadband infrastructure. With the ‘Cyber Korea 21’, Korea has succeeded in establishing a nationwide Internet penetration and overall information service base.

However, South Korea's full-fledged development began with the ‘IT 839’ policy, which was pushed forward in 2004. The strategy, which was created as a breakthrough to overcome the crisis of the global economic downturn and make an international economic comeback, was aimed at bringing Korea into the ranks of advanced countries by fostering the IT industry, which Korea has relatively dominated. It planned to deploy eight services, including HSDPA / W-CDMA, Wibro, and Broadband connectivity services, as well as three infrastructures, including Broadband convergence Network (BcN), U-sensor network (NUS), and soft infraware.

The Ministry of Science and ICT began to develop basic plan for BcN in 2004. BcN is a newly coined term that incorporates the concept of convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting into the international standard NGN (Next Generation Network), aiming to revitalize the IT industry in Korea and to make Korea's information and communication technology exert a global influence. BcN’s goal is to make broadband available up to 100 Mbps per wired subscriber, up to 1 Mbps per wireless subscriber, and to provide converged services at high quality through an ip-based converged network. BcN was ultimately to provide broadband access to all homes and offices where people reside, and to enable network access at all times, whether on the go or fixed. In December 2010, the BcN project, initiated by the government, was successfully completed and the BcN is currently being built in small villages by Ministry of science and ICT to reduce the network gap between the city and the rural area.

So far, we have looked at the development of government-led broadband policy. Since the 1990s, the government has tried various policies aimed at becoming an IT powerhouse, and as a result, Korea has succeeded in gaining global dominance in the IT industry and fostering the broadband industry greatly. However, we should see the role of broadband service providers in Korea's big growth in the IT industry. This time, let's take a look at Korea's broadband development, focusing on the activities of broadband operators. There are three big operators in Korea: KT, SK Telecom, LG U+. Of these, KT was the oldest operator and first started as a telephone company in 1998. In the early days of broadband adoption, KT succeeded in becoming the largest broadband operator based on nationwide telephone networks. Soon, however, SKT succeeded in commercializing ADSL for the first time, and three operators began to compete to attract subscribers.

On April 1, 1999, Hanaro Telecom (now SK Telecom) commercialized the world's first high-speed Internet ADSL. The day marked the beginning of a new book on Korean IT history. Until then, KT had been building an exclusive system for more than 100 years, but Hanaro introduced ADSL for the first time in the world, creating an Internet craze in Korea. The initial ADSL was 8Mbps, which seems slow for now, but at a fairly rapid pace at that time gave people a surprise. The ADSL craze has made portal site culture active in Korea, and has contributed greatly to Korean people's enthusiasm for online activities. In August 2000, ADSL attracted more than 1 million users for the first time. In addition, three telecom companies (KT, SKT Broadband, LG U+) fiercely competed to attract subscribers over ADSL and VDSL, which greatly affected Korea's ability to become an strong country in IT field.

Based on ADSL in 2002, VDSL was introduced with much faster up-and-down speed, and later in 2005 when KT commercialized FTTH with a speed of 100 Mbps, xDSL gradually began to lose users. ADSL2, ADSL2+, an improved version of ADSL, was not used in South Korea. It was not necessary because other fast communication technologies such as VDSL and FTTH were already applied. With the development of FTTH technology, ADSL users were increasingly less and less than 100 households as of 2017. ADSL, which was a major contributor to Korea's high-speed service distribution in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has increasingly entered the road of decline.

In the case of Wireless Broadband in Korea, We should say about Wibro. WiBro, which is also called mobile WiMAX in other countries, is a wireless broadband Internet technology developed by Samsung Electronics Co. and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. It was commercialized for the first time in the world by SK Telecom in June 2016. WiBro, created by taking advantage of the existing wireless Internet service CDMA and WiFi, was adopted as an international standard in January 2005. With a speed of 1 Mbps and a coverage of 50 KM, WiBro is a cheap version of the 3G cellular. However, the LTE network was established earlier than expected, and the introduction of the faster LTE network gradually resulted in the WiBro network losing subscribers. So WiBro eventually ended the service on Dec. 31, 2018.

According to the statistics of Ministry of science of ICT, Korea's national average LTE quality is 158.53 Mbps on download and 42.83 Mbps on upload, according to the 2019 quality assessment of telecommunications services. This is a small-scale improvement over the previous year, with a transmission success rate of 99 percent for both downloads and uploads. For WiFi services, the open WiFi was found to have a speed of 374.18 Mbps to download, 335.73 Mbps to upload, while the public WiFi had a speed of 394.76 Mbps to upload 356.46.

And on April 3, 2019, Korea succeeded in commercializing 5G for the first time in the world. The competition for preoccupying the innovative image of the word ‘5G’ was fierce. Verizon in the U.S. tried to commercialize 5G first by adding 5G modules to its LTE phones, but eventually the honor of first place went to Korea. As a result, Korea exceeded 4 million subscribers of 5G as of December 2019. In addition, government and broadband operators from each country visited Korea to learn about commercialization of 5G and Korea made many overseas export contracts.

But this is just a success in 2019, and 2020 will be another chapter. If 2019 was the first commercialized year of 5G, 2020 would be the time for the 5G industry to be activated. South Korea has taken over the title of first commercialization, but given the pace of growth in China and the United States, it is self-evident that they will regain control of the market and industry leadership. Korea has a history of failing to profit from rapid commercialization because of failing to create an industrial ecosystem. So many Korean hope 5G will not follow this path. The three broadband operators and the Korean government will recognize this and step up efforts to revitalize the 5G industry in 2020. According to the government's announcement, they will make efforts to revitalize 5G by expanding tax deductions for investments in 5G networks, establish 28Ghz base stations. Also they will change from the existing compatibility mode (NSA) that used to be a mix of 4G and 5G to the single mode (SA) for 5G.

Korea is known as a giant of IT, but in fact, it was not doing well in the mobile sector compared to other countries that showed big growth. Although it has always topped the ‘Internet access’ category, it ranked 11th as of 2018 in the ‘Mobile Broadband Subscribers’ category in OECD statistics. Compared to the Korea’s overwhelming first place in this field in 2010 and 2011, it is a poor performance. It is time to try to move back to the top in the mobile broadband sector. This will depend on how Korea develops the 5G in 2020. However, the other countries such as Japan, Australia and Hong Kong will be newly commercializing the 5G industry in 2020, and also the U.S. and China is growing at a rapid pace. We need to see if Korea will defend its 5G power title in the meantime. 

We analyze international broadband and HbbTV evolution (here, the case of South Korea) in this blog, in Research Group about Digital Journalism and Marketing and Broadband and in Research Group on Innovative Monetization Systems of Digital Journalism, Marketing and Tourism (SIMPED), from CECABLE,  Escola Universitària Mediterrani of UdG, UPF and Blanquerna-URL, in Twitter (@CECABLEresearch), in the group of LinkedIn, in the page of LinkedIn, in the group of Facebook, in Instagram (CECABLE), in Pinterest and in this blog. We will go in deep in the XXV Cable and Broadband Catalonia Congress (during 2021 if COVID-19 allows it, in Blanquerna Auditorium, Barcelona).