From CNET: South Koreans currently enjoy the world's fastest Internet speeds, so it makes sense that they would be the first to get a fifth-generation mobile network, aka 5G.
SK Telecom, the country's most widely used mobile carrier, on Thursday declared it would be the world's first operator of a 5G network as it opened the doors of the 5G Playground, a facility dedicated to researching the nascent service, The Korea Herald reports.
Following 4G LTE, 5G is the next significant update to wireless Internet connectivity. SK reportedly demonstrated speeds of up to 19.1 gigabits per second, nearly 1,000 times faster than the 25 megabits-per-second in which 4G LTE users in South Korea currently luxuriate. That 5G speed would let you download a 2GB movie in fractions of a second.
"SKT will spare no efforts to achieve the world's first commercialisation of the 5G network," CEO Choi Jin-sung said at the opening of the Playground.
At the opening of the centre, which was launched in conjunction with tech giants Samsung Electronics, Nokia, Intel, telco infrastructure provider Ericsson and electronics firm Rhode & Schwartz, SK Telecom said it would have a test network running by 2017. That's ahead of a globally standardised, commercially usable network by 2020.
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