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.
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