Complaints Mount Over CDMA2000 Service
The communication quality on high-speed wireless Internet sets is being called substandard by many consumers. The so-called CDMA2000 service promises transmission speeds 10 times faster than existing handsets and streaming video. Domestic service providers of the third generation service have attracted a total of 465,000 subscribers since they launched the service about six months ago.
One of the most critical problems with the high-speed mobile service lies in the small number of base transmission stations, which weighs heavily on the communication quality. SK Telecom, for an instance, operates about 4,000 transmission stations across the country for the existing mobile service, but the firm has only about 2,000 stations for the CDMA2000 service.
The same goes for KTF, which has about 7,000 stations for normal handset communication, but only 1,500 for the high-speed service. Subscribers of the CDMA2000 have been complaining of its communication often going out of service, which happens, according to industry observers, because of the insufficient number of transmission stations.
The quality of the handsets for the high-speed service has not yet satisfied the customer. Samsung Electronics recently offered a free-of-charge software replacement service for the customers in response to complaints of repeated cut-offs during Internet chatting.
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