North Korea 5g base station mobile energy

The 5G NR standard has been designed based on the knowledge of the typical traffic activity in radio networks as well as the need to support sleep states in radio network equipment. By putting the base station into a sleep state when there is no traffic to serve i.e. switching off hardware components, it will consume less energy.

In the report, South Korea ranked first among 29 countries, including non-OECD members such as China and the European Union, in “5G base station deployment.” The country recorded 593 5G base stations per 100,000 inhabitants, significantly surpassing Lithuania (328) and Finland (251).

In April 2019, the Republic of Korea launched the world's first smart phone based, business-to-consumer (B2C) 5G commercial services. In two years, the country's 5G subscribers surpassed 13 million, accounting for 20 percent of total mobile subscriptions.

Emerging use cases and devices demand higher capacity from today's mobile networks, leading to increasingly dense network deployments. In this post, we explore the energy saving features of 5G New Radio and how this enables operators to build denser networks, meet performance demands and maintain low 5G energy consumption.

5G New Radio (NR) is designed to enable denser network deployments and simultaneously deliver increased energy efficiency, thus reducing both operational costs and environmental impacts. Before we explore the new technical features, let's look more closely at how the existing 4G LTE radio networks function.

Globally, 5G is in the early stage of development both from market and technology perspectives. However, Korea is one of the countries that have demonstrated early successes in bringing a domestic network to scale and building a comprehensive national strategy to maximize the transformative potential of 5G.