South Korea is the clear leader in 5G services, a new report has found.

The 5G Country Leadership Index, compiled by Arthur D. Little (ADL) shows South Korea is clearly ahead of the United States, Australia, Qatar, Switzerland, Finland, Spain and United Arab Emirates.

Benchmarking over 40 countries, it identifies France and Germany as “distant 5G followers”, while Italy and UK are slightly behind the leading countries.

Regionally, South East Asia is most advanced, with South Korea using the Winter Olympics as an opportunity to showcase its leadership.

The US is among the first to launch commercial 5G services. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are also ahead, while Europe overall lags due to heterogeneous infrastructure and fragmentation, as well as outstanding/ongoing spectrum allocation processes in many countries.

The Index is based on detailed analysis of technical infrastructure and tendency for 5G commercialisation.

Leaders have 5G spectrum allocated, high performance backhaul infrastructure deployed, have announced ambitious goals for 5G launch or launched already, and have successfully trialled multiple use-cases.

Driving 5G progress

Also, they demonstrate a willingness to adopt new services and have the right level of competition to foster commercialisation.

The findings of the 5G Leadership Index validate ADL’s 2017 report on the five potential deployment models for 5G.

Globally, Gigabit broadband to the home, future corporate networks and digital industrial ecosystems are those models that seem to have driven 5G progress most significantly.

For example, 5G Fixed-Wireless-Access improves coverage with Gigabit broadband, which the US is pushing for heavily.

And 5G is central to the next stage of digitalisation, providing the always on, high speed and high capacity networks to underpin industrial process automation, autonomous vehicles, robotics and artificial intelligence.

The race is on

“Future business competitiveness will rely on 5G networks, making their fast deployment essential,” explains Karim Taga, Managing Partner and Global Practice Leader TIME at Arthur D. Little.

“While South Korea is currently the clear leader, many others are also moving beyond trials to launch 5G networks, Taga said.

He expects adoption to accelerate later this year following the recent launch of 5G devices at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“During 2019, we foresee that dozens of operators will launch 5G services commercially, eventually improving their countries’ ranking … the race is on,” he said.