OMDIA ranks South Korea as top global 5G market

Based on these factors OMDIA's research concluded that South Korea – as it did in the 4G era – has established itself as the early market-leader for 5G technology deployment with Kuwait and Switzerland following behind.

"Korea is leading the way with adoption reaching 5.88 million at the end of March; approaching ten percent of wireless services in the market," the report says.

"However, expansive coverage rolled out by Sunrise and Swisscom in Switzerland, Ooredoo and Vodafone in Qatar and Kuwait three service providers has rivalled Korea for breadth of market coverage."

Commenting on the report OMDIA Principal Analyst Stephen Myers said:

"The global market is steadily gearing up for 5G deployment but right now South Korea is leading the way – although markets like Switzerland have also made steady progress.

"Despite the COVID pandemic we are seeing governments and regulators pushing ahead with their allocation of 5G spectrum and operators continue to launch and expand 5G network coverage.

"We can expect to see a much larger number of commercial 5G launches in major global markets in the next 12-18 months as more spectrum is released across the world."

Notes to Editors

Ranking Methodology

The ranking used in this report looks to assess the market 5G progress combine the following assessment criteria

The combination of these criteria reflect the readiness in markets yet to launch services and development in markets where 5G services have been launched. While using coverage metrics does advantage small geographies, where a large proportion of the population can be covered with 100's of base stations rather than 1,000's or 10,000's, broad and deep coverage remain prerequisite for the transition of services to 5G. As 5G services mature and as enterprise applications become more central to service provider offerings it can be expected the criteria for assessing 5G progress would evolve.

The criteria used reflect the foundational factors for each market (each allocated a 10% weighting)

The rankings use a relative assessment, effectively assigning Korea a score of 100% for the September quarter due to its global leadership across all five of the assessment criteria:

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1308724/5G_Global_Ranking_March_2020.jpg