Australia’s 5G is remarkable when compared to other countries in our region

This may be a touch nerdy for some people, but I’d like to take a moment to remind you just how great we have it here in Australia when it comes to telecommunications. In particular, our 5G rollout and how we shape up globally.

Ookla, the company behind the popular “Speed test” app and service have gathered together some research relating to 5G in the Asia Pacific region.

It’s clear that South Korea, Australia and China are leading the way, being among the first in the world to launch commercial 5G networks.

And here in the Asia Pacific our 5G performance outperforms Europe – mainly thanks to availability of spectrum.

Having just being in Seoul, it’s no surprise they lead the way, with an median download speed of 533.95 Mbps – but there’s something critical about South Korea. With a population of over 50 million Korea is a big country – but it’s actually tiny, Australia is 78 times larger than South Korea by land mass.

That stat alone makes it simply remarkable that both South Korea and Australia have the same availability rates – at around 36.6%.

This report defines “availability” as “the percentage of users on 5G-capable devices that spend most of the time with access to 5G networks”.

Counterpoint research suggests actual compatibility to 5G, that is the penetration of 5G capable smartphones is at 82% in Australia – In Europe this struggles to break past 30%.

So, next time you get frustrated at your smartphone, have some respect for TPG, Optus and Telstra who are investing billions to make sure we get world-leading network access.