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This time both operators win three mobile network experience awards outright and jointly win one other. LG U+ grows its awards haul since our last report six months ago from two awards to three sole wins plus one jointly won award.
LG U+ displaces KT, which tied with SK telecom in our last report. However, our users on all three operators enjoyed a Good mobile gaming experience with a narrow difference in scores between the three operators ranging from 77.6 on KT, 79.4 on SK telecom and 79.8 on LG U+ on our one hundred point scale.
Opensignal's Voice App Experience award has changed hands in this report. Last time, SK telecom won but now it has been narrowly beaten by LG U+ with a score of 83.3. There is little to choose between the operators with all three separated by under one point on our one hundred point scale.
Streaming mobile video requires a consistent experience so playback does not stutter and audio plays seamlessly. Only SK telecom users enjoy an Excellent (75 or above) Video Experience in South Korea with a score almost unchanged since our last report. Our users on KT and LG U+ stayed in the Very Good category (65 < 75) this time although both operators saw their score increase slightly with KT only just missing out on reaching Excellent with a score of 74.5.
Our LG U+ users have clearly the fastest upload speeds of South Korea's operators with a speed of 16.4 Mbps, ahead of SK telecom's 14.5 Mbps and KT's 12.3 Mbps. Upload speed is especially important for sharing videos and high quality images taken by the latest generation of smartphones where cameras now reach over 100 megapixels on popular Korean models.
South Korea's mobile network experience continues to be one of the best in the world. While 5G adoption is very high compared with other countries, the majority of mobile users still use 4G and older technologies most of the time.
In this new report we again look at the overall mobile network experience of South Korean mobile users looking across all mobile technology generations and all our users in the country. The results here include measurements from 5G tests, as well as from older generations, to create the overall results for each operators
| Mobile Experience Awards South Korea | |||
|---|---|---|---|
December 2020,
South Korea Report
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S
SK telecom
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L
LG U+
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K
KT
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Video Experience
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Games Experience
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Voice App Experience
| |||
Download Speed Experience
| |||
Upload Speed Experience
| |||
4G Availability
| |||
4G Coverage Experience
| |||
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Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
December 2020,
South Korea
|
|---|---|
|
Video Experience
|
S
SK telecom
|
|
Voice App Experience
|
L
LG U+
|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
S
SK telecom
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
L
LG U+
|
|
4G Availability
|
L
LG U+
|
|
4G Coverage Experience
|
S
SK telecom
|
|
Mobile Experience Awards Draws
|
December 2020, South Korea
|
|---|---|
|
Games Experience
|
S
SK telecom
L
LG U+
|
Opensignal's Video Experience measures the experience of watching mobile video on smartphones based on measurements from our users. The approach combines these technical measures into a single score that reflects the perceived video quality using a mean opinion score model (MOS) with an ITU-based approach. We directly measure a range of video characteristics encountered by our users including video loading time and the stalling rate across a range of video resolutions.
In our latest analysis of South Korea's mobile video experience we see SK telecom users again enjoy the highest Video Experience score of 75.8 which places it into the Excellent category (75 and above) on a one hundred point scale. Both LG U+ and KT were again in the Very Good category (65 < 75) slightly behind the Video Experience award winner SK telecom.
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Multiplayer mobile gaming is continuing to grow ever further in popularity as mobile networks improve response times and become more consistent in the experience they offer users. This is important because even a brief interruption to the mobile network experience can ruin a gaming session.
Opensignal's mobile Games Experience quantifies the experience when playing real-time multiplayer mobile games, popular examples include Lineage, PUBG Mobile, Among Us, or Arena of Valor. Opensignal's Games Experience measure is built on several years of research quantifying the relationship between technical network parameters and the gaming experience as reported by real mobile users. These parameters include latency (round trip time), jitter (variability of latency) and packet loss (the proportion of data packets that never reach their destination). Additionally, it considers multiple genres of multiplayer mobile games to measure the average sensitivity to network conditions.
SK telecom and LG U+ jointly win the Games Experience award this time with scores of 79.4 and 79.8 which are a statistical tie because of overlapping confidence intervals. Since our last report, LG U+ has jumped over KT, leaving KT now in third place.
Opensignal's Voice App experience reflects the real-time communication using popular over-the-top apps. Popular examples of such apps include KaKaoTalk, LINE, Facetime or WhatsApp. The model characterizes the exact relationship between the technical measurements and perceived call quality using an ITU-based approach to create a score that reflects the perceived voice quality.
LG U+ wins the Voice App Experience award this time, snatching the award from last report's winner, SK telecom. KT is again in third place with a slightly lower score. However, there is under one point separating the Voice App Experience on all three operators.
SK telecom has a clear win in Download Speed Experience with an average speed of 74.5 Mbps, well ahead of LG U+ in second place with 56.0 Mbps and KT with 53.1 Mbps. The speed our SK telecom users have experienced has increased from 69.0 Mbps six months ago, in part due to rising 5G adoption and the much higher 5G speeds pushing up the overall average for SK telecom.
We've also seen similar speed increases on LG U+ and KT, where download speeds rose from 50.8 Mbps to 56 Mbps using LG U+ and from 48.1 Mbps to 53.1 Mbps with KT. Again, increasing 5G adoption is helping boost the overall experience on all three of South Korea's operators.
This is an extremely impressive real-world speed that is only very slightly slower than the operator that won Opensignal's global Download Speed Experience award in summer 2020. Then, Telus won with 75.8 Mbps, with SK telecom in the chasing pack but much further behind than it is now. However, with fast rising 5G adoption in South Korea, SK telecom will hope to win a global Opensignal award in future to add to its collection of South Korea awards.
LG U+ has a clear win on Upload Speed Experience again with a speed of 16.4 Mbps, with SK telecom forced into second place and a score of 14.5 Mbps. This different result from our Download Speed Experience result highlights why it's important to look at both types of speed separately rather than combining them into a single speed result because it would hide which operator is best for uploading large files such as videos or images for social media.
4G is ubiquitous across South Korea. We see the time that smartphone users are able to connect to 4G services is approaching 100% of the time on all three operators. While 5G is fast growing in South Korea, most of today's 5G services use an early type of 5G technology — non-standalone access (NSA) — where a 5G smartphone has to be connected to a 4G signal at the same time as a 5G connection. With NSA, if there is no 4G service, there can be no 5G connection either. Therefore, it continues to be important to measure 4G Availability or the time users are able to connect to 4G.
When operators upgrade their core networks to a 5G cloud core, then they will be able to move on from this reliance on 4G and offer standalone 5G (SA) and launch newer versions of the 5G standard. This will enable South Korea's operators to offer even more capabilities, and most notably to improve latencies — the responsiveness of the network — which will benefit multiplayer mobile gaming, among other activities.
4G Coverage Experience is a measure of how mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator's network. Measured on a scale of 0-10, it analyzes the locations where customers of a network operator received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by users of all network operators.
For the first time, Opensignal has analyzed the overall mobile experience across nineteen South Korean cities. We see a different balance of power, depending on the part of the country we consider.
In Seoul, LG U+ wins the mobile Games Experience award, unlike the national result, as well as winning Upload Speed Experience and Voice App Experience. SK telecom wins the other two awards: Video Experience and Download Speed Experience.
By contrast, if we look at Busan in the far south, we see a very different set of results. Video Experience is now tied between KT and SK telecom, the Games Experience is shared between SK telecom and LG U+, while all three share the Voice App Experience golden microphone.
In Daegu, there are also many joint wins, with only the Download Speed Experience award going to a single operator as SK telecom adds to its speed haul.
While Incheon is geographically close to Seoul, South Koreans must check to see how the winners differ. Here, SK telecom has to share the Video Experience award with both KT and LG U+ although Games Experience, Upload Speed Experience and Download Speed Experience go to the same winner as in Seoul.
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Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
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