South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Wednesday it has prepared a “2026 telecom service quality assessment implementation plan” and will 추진 stronger assessments, aiming to improve quality centered on what users actually experience.

The telecom service quality assessment measures the coverage, accessibility rate and transmission speed of major services such as 5G, LTE and wired internet, providing users with objective information. It is carried out annually to encourage investment by telecom operators.

This year’s 5G quality assessment will, as last year, cover a total of 600 sites. It will particularly strengthen assessments of indoor facilities and outdoor areas. For indoor facilities, it will allocate 300 sites, half of the total, and expand the share of assessments focusing on commercial and cultural facilities that are more likely to be vulnerable. It will switch to a method of directly assessing locations where users actually face inconvenience, such as areas reported by civic groups.

It will also include underground commercial facilities within buildings and indoor facilities in farming and fishing villages as new assessment types. It will focus on facilities without indoor 5G base stations, strengthening efforts to encourage in-building investment. For outdoor areas, it will sharply increase the number of shared-network assessment sites to 102 from 60 last year, to reduce quality gaps between urban and rural areas and increase incentives for shared-network investment.

It will maintain the current standard for insufficient quality, but introduce an additional improvement advisory standard to reflect user-perceived quality levels. It will designate as “quality improvement advisory areas” regions where 10 percent or more of results fail to exceed 100 Mbps, to encourage operators to step up improvement efforts.

For high-speed rail sections, it will apply shared network 2.0 technology to address quality issues on the Gyeongbu and Honam lines. The ministry will also prepare this year for telecom operators’ transition to 5G standalone mode, or SA. It will form a research group of industry, academia and research experts to develop evaluation indicators and measurement methods reflecting SA characteristics.

It will maintain the service-specific required speed fulfilment rate announced last year and the 5G-LTE simultaneous measurement method. The required speed fulfilment rate indicates the share of time that the needed speed for each service used by actual users is provided stably. The 5G-LTE simultaneous measurement reflects real usage conditions in which LTE radio resources are used simultaneously by 5G and LTE users.

For 5G connection-deficient facilities and areas with insufficient 5G and LTE quality identified in last year’s assessment, it will check whether improvements have been made through a midterm review. It will announce the overall review results in December along with this year’s quality assessment results.

Choi Woo-hyuk (최우혁), director general for the Information Security and Network Policy Office at the ministry, said, “Telecom service quality is now an issue of user experience that people feel in daily life, beyond just speed.” He said, “We will strengthen quality assessments focusing on vulnerable areas and areas with major user inconvenience, and actively encourage telecom operators’ investment and quality improvements.”