As the impeachment crisis has led to an increase in news viewership, including on YouTube, the domestic monthly 5G (fifth-generation mobile communication) traffic is expected to exceed 1 million terabytes (TB) for the first time.
According to the Ministry of Science and ICT's statistics on wireless and wired communication service subscriptions and wireless data traffic as of the 22nd, the domestic 5G traffic usage recorded 996,782 TB as of last October, and is predicted to surpass 100,000 TB this month.
Domestic monthly 5G traffic steadily increased from 121,444 TB at the end of 2019, the first year of commercialization, and has been recording over 900,000 TB since April of this year. The traffic per subscriber, calculated by dividing the total traffic by the number of subscribers, has fluctuated between 24 GB and 29 GB over the past five years. However, with the surge in video viewership due to the impeachment crisis this month, it is anticipated to exceed 30 GB for the first time.
On the 3rd, when martial law was declared, Naver experienced connectivity issues for about two hours due to a surge in users, resulting in increased traffic. Following this, it is analyzed that hundreds of thousands of citizens watched real-time YouTube videos or communicated with each other during gatherings related to the vote on President Yoon Suk-yeol's impeachment proposal on the 7th and 14th, leading to significantly higher traffic usage than usual. Telecommunications companies also responded by installing 39 temporary base stations ahead of the gatherings.