The South Korea government has set an ambitious goal to grab a larger pie of the global 5G market as it calculates that its 5G hardware and software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of only 75.6% during the period from 2020-2026 against a much faster pace of 148% projected for the global 5G market for the forecast period, according to Digitimes Research.
Aiming to become one of the members of the leading group of the global 5G industry, Korea's telecom operators will begin to try out its 5G networks in 2018 and push the 5G networks into commercial operations in 2020 before integrating its 5G services with other applications such as AR/VR, AI, autonomous driving, smart city, disaster relief and healthcare in 2022.
Korea's telecom operators, led by Korea Telecom (KT), have already implemented 5G demonstration networks at the main venues of Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to begin its 5G trial operations.
The Korea government also plans to raise R&D ratios for related 5G developments, to pursue hyperlinks and low latency for its 5G networks during the forecast period; it aims to reach a 5G maximum transmission speed of 20Gbps, a latency of one millisecond and a maximum of one million connected devices per square kilometer of the networks.