Korea's leadership in 5G and beyond: Footprints and futures

The Korean government has played a crucial role in the development of advanced mobile networks, including 5G. Korea became the first country in the world to not only launch a nationwide 5G network but also to commercialize 5G services. In addition to looking at the steps toward 5G-related developments in Korea, this study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling analysis to examine how 5G-related discourse was formed in the media after its commercialization. As a result of analyzing news articles in the Korean press with 5G as the main keyword, a total of five topics were derived. Intriguingly, most topics contained several new articles related to government policies. Considering the characteristics of the mobile network industry—e.g. as an industry that receives licenses from the government—this result suggests that 5G-related issues are closely related to government policies. Our topic modeling results confirm that the interventionist promotion policy of the Korean government which acted as a catalyst for technology and business innovation played an important role in Korea's 5G leadership.