The US, UK, and Australia are the world’s biggest 5G sceptics

By Dan Oliver
published

Research into negative search terms related to 5G technology has revealed that the United Kingdom, US, and Australia are the most sceptical people when it comes to 5G.

Prolifics Testing
(Image credit: Prolifics Testing.)

Despite the million-dollar ad campaigns, growing device support, and huge potential for new use cases, 5G is still struggling to win over people who are sceptical about the health risks surrounding this networking technology.

To gauge how individual countries currently view 5G technology, Prolifics Testing (opens in new tab), a web and mobile testing company, utilised online analytics tool Ahrefs (opens in new tab) to discover which countries in the world are most sceptical about 5G, based on specific search engine queries relating to 5G. To do this, Prolifics Testing classified and grouped consistently recurring Google searches, such as ‘is 5G dangerous?’, ‘is 5G safe?’, ‘is 5G harmful?’, ‘does 5G pose health risks?’, and so on.

Prolifics Testing found that for sheer volume of monthly searches, the United States was in first place (374,700), the UK in second (93,400), with Australia capping off the top three (32,9700). 

However, when broken down by searches on a per-population basis, the UK jumped into first place with 1.4k searches per-million people, with Australia also rising a place to second (1.3k searches per-million people), and the US dropping down to third 1.1k searches per-million people).

The worst of the rest

Canada (22,680) and Poland (20,510) are among the other countries in the world where there are more than 20,000 tentative online searches about 5G every month, respectively ranking fourth and fifth. 

And on the flipside of the coin, with the least amount of sceptical searches in the top 20 countries tested, was Denmark, where there is an average of 1,410 sceptical 5G searches each month, with Denmark's per-million people figure sitting at just 235, making it six times lower than the UK's chart-topping total.

To conduct this research, data was taken from 155 countries, from across six continents, and the search volume data used for each respective country represented the average monthly online searches.  

Prolifics Testing 5G infographic.

(Image credit: Prolifics Testing.)
Dan Oliver
Dan Oliver

Dan is a British journalist with 20 years of experience in the design and tech sectors, producing content for the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, Dell and The Sunday Times. In 2012 he helped launch the world's number one design blog, Creative Bloq (opens in new tab). Dan is now editor-in-chief at 5Gradar, where he oversees news, insight and reviews, providing an invaluable resource for anyone looking to stay up-to-date with the key issues facing 5G.