Samsung delivers largest share of 5G in Korea

Samsung Electronics announced that it has delivered the largest share of 5G network solutions in Korea, making it the leading 5G network vendor in the country. 5G service is now commercially available to consumers and enterprises by all three mobile carriers in 85 cities across the country.

 Korean operators have been transmitting 5G signals in Seoul and metropolitan areas since December 1, 2018, using 5G base station radios and 5G core solutions from Samsung’s Networks Business unit. To further expand the 5G network, Samsung has supplied 5G core solutions and more than 53,000 5G radio base stations to Korea’s three operators.

Korean operators rolled out their commercial 5G networks using Samsung’s 5G Massive-MIMO Unit (MMU) radio base station in the 3.5GHz spectrum. A key characteristic of Samsung MMUs deployed in Korea is that they are among the smallest and lightest in the industry, ensuring they can be easily installed in existing operators’ cellular sites requiring minimal changes. This ability to re-use an existing site has been key to enabling the Korean operators to deploy 5G network consisting of tens of thousands of radios within just a few months since the Dec 1st launch. 

The virtualized 5G core solutions, provided to all three Korean operators for their 5G commercial launch, support both legacy 4G networks and next-generation 5G services in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode. They can also migrate to Standalone (SA) mode through a simple software upgrade in the future. Samsung’s solution implements many of the key technologies of 5G networks, such as Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS), which are essential for network operators to scale their networks and support the new services enabled by 5G technology.