LIVE FROM MWC21 BARCELONA: KT’s head of enterprise group argued adoption of 5G services in the enterprise market was hampered by a lack of business cases, and slow development of devices and applications.

Speaking at the GTI Summit, Shin Soo-Jung (pictured) said clear customer value often is not being articulated to justify the adoption of 5G for a business, delaying the spread of the technology.

He explained “many companies perceive 5G as simply a network, rather than a platform” with applications, partnerships and service support.

While the B2B opportunity for 5G services is attractive, he insisted the difficulties need to be overcome for “full-scale activation” of the technology in the enterprise segment.

“We are developing differential technologies, so our customers can use value-added 5G as well as network slicing technology to separate traffic for each application.”

KT is pushing the transition from non-standalone to standalone 5G, but Shin provided no detail on the expected timeframe.

He said 5G is central to a $140 billion South Korean government initiative to boost the nation’s ICT competitiveness by 2025 through expanding networks and developing multi-access edge computing (MEC) convergence services.

An additional $17.4 billion will be invested in smart cities and various industrial applications.

“KT is planning to cooperate with the government in all processes, from demonstration projects to successful commercialisation,” he said.