417 5G base stations were randomly inspected, and 88 failed! The service quality is lower than LTE

Yonhap News Agency reported on September 20 that according to materials submitted by the Korea Communications Agency (KCA) to the Science, Technology and ICT Committee of the National Assembly of South Korea, as of September 8, 88 (21.1%) of the 417 5G base stations of the three mobile operators failed the on-site inspection after completion.

Before the deployment of 5G base stations, only 5% of the base stations failed the random inspection after completion, indicating that the quality of 5G services is significantly lower than that of existing LTE and other types of base stations.

The random inspection of base station completion is divided into performance inspection and comparison inspection. The performance inspection is to confirm whether the base station has emitted other radio waves outside the communication frequency band and other technical indicators. The comparison inspection is to confirm whether the completion status of the base station is consistent with the documents submitted when the construction commencement declaration was made.

In terms of performance inspection, the telecom company with the highest failure rate was SK Telecom, with 17 out of 196 base station equipment (8.7%) failing. In comparison, only 3 out of 108 (2.8%) of KT failed, and only 1 out of 113 (0.9%) of LG U+ failed.

However, in the comparison, LG U+ had the highest failure rate. 33 out of 113 units under LG U+ failed (29.2%). Next was KT, with 16 out of 108 units (14.8%), and SK Telecom, with 18 out of 196 units (9.2%).

The reasons for failure include discrepancies between registration documents and the site, unnecessary radio waves transmitted outside the platform, and power leakage from adjacent channels. The South Korean government plans to conduct a re-inspection within six months.

South Korean lawmaker Byeon Il pointed out that when the number of base station equipment reported in each region exceeds 20, only 10% will be randomly sampled for inspection. In fact, there may be more substandard 5G base station equipment.

As of September 2, South Korea's three mobile operators have built nearly 80,000 5G base stations and nearly 180,000 base station transceiver devices, which means they have completed 78% of this year's planned construction target.

LG U+ currently has the largest number of base stations, reaching 30,282, KT has 27,537 base stations, and SK Telecom has 21,666 base stations.

Since South Korea launched 5G commercial services on April 3, the number of 5G users is estimated to have exceeded 2.5 million in just 5 months!