There havent been many bright spots in broadband....but Korea and Japan are still doing well. The forecast for year-end 1x subscribers was at 1m before the year started and 2m around May. They are now likely to hit at least 4.3 million. The race is on to get 1xEV-DO working before the World Cup in May.
koreaherald.co.kr.
KTF demonstrates cdma2000 1x EV-DO
KTF, the country's second largest mobile service provider, yesterday held a demonstration of the so-called cdma2000 1x EV-DO, or third-generation (3G), wireless network technology, heating up the race for faster data-oriented services in Korea.
Currently, Korea's three major wireless carriers are offering cdma2000 1x, the so-called 2.5 generation service armed with a data transmission speed of up to 144Kbps. The EV-DO upgrade is forecast to raise the speed dramatically to 2.4Mbps, allowing subscribers to enjoy multimedia contents on the go.
KTF showed off high-speed wireless multimedia transmission via notebook PCs as well as mobile handsets, offering a preview for what could greet Korean users in coming months.
The race for EV-DO comes as voice-oriented second-generation wireless service is reaching saturation point and subscribers begin to show interest in wireless data services. The shift in trend is expected to drive up the demand for data, which now accounts for a small part of revenues for mobile carriers.
SK Telecom, KTF and LG Telecom plan to commercialize cdma2000 1x EV-DO services before June 2002 when Korea-Japan World Cup soccer championships takes place.
KTF's testing-level demonstration presented the VOD (video-on-demand), MMS (multimedia messaging service), speed comparison with existing mobile networks and KTF's mobile Internet service, Multipack.
KTF also staged demonstrations for ordinary mobile users in major downtown areas in Seoul.
KTF is pushing for 1x EV-DO implementation as part of efforts to secure an initiative in the fiercely competitive market. The mobile unit of state-run KT Corp. introduced the cdma2000 1x system in March this year.
"The company has been testing the EV-DO equipment since early November in three downtown areas in Seoul and a testing-level service will kick off in March next year," a KTF spokesman said.
KTF expects that 25 percent of its total revenue will come from non-voice services in 2005, a projection that is going to require a combination of business restructuring and data-oriented service upgrades next year.
The company claimed that the demonstration - outside of research labs - marks a world first for the cdma2000 1x EV-DO service based on commercial systems and handsets.
It said NTT DoCoMo's 3G service based on W-CDMA technology delivers data at 384Kbps (or three to four frames a second), but KTF's EV-DO technology could offer up to 2.4Mbps or 12 frames per second.
Cdma2000 1x EV-DO technology is based on HDR (high data rate) developed by U.S.-based wireless technology form Qualcomm Inc.
But critics said EV-DO technology is yet to prove its commercial viability. LG Telecom, for instance, has been claiming that it would not adopt EV-DO since its reliability is questionable as a service.
LG Telecom officials argued that EV-DO has only a limited data transmission coverage in a "cell," which could put pressure on the actual data speed when the number of users increases.
"We are still unsure about what kind of service we could provide to users if we ever adopt EV-DO," an LG Telecom executive told The Korea Herald.
In fact, there is a gap between maximum and actual data speed. In the research labs, the speed supposedly reaches a peak of 2.4Mbps under ideal settings. But it goes down steeply in actual environment, especially downtown areas where a number of users log on to the network at the same time.
"Average EV-DO data transmission speed under tough conditions is about 800kbps," KTF 3G technology planning director Ha Tae-suk explained.
Ha said EV-DO users are also likely to see brief lapses of transmission when moving from one cell to the other. But interruption time is so brief that users may not notice the lapse, he added.
The real issue is capacity. If 800kbps is the actual data transmission speed, subscribers in a single cell have to share it with each other.
"If two users are getting the data in a single cell, each user could get 400kbps," Ha said. In other words, 10 users in a single cell would have to live with just 80kbps data speed, raising the question about the service quality in heavily congested areas in metropolitan areas.
Although EV-DO has yet to overcome such skeptical views, cdma2000 1x service is finally taking off, the Ministry of Information and Communication said yesterday.
The ministry said the number of cdma2000 1x users reached 3.49 million as of the end of November this year, recording a faster-than-expected growth since its formal debut in October last year.
The portion of cdma2000 1x users among total mobile subscribers in Korea, which numbered at 29.09 million in end-November, was 12 percent, the ministry said.
It said about 700,000-800,000 mobile users are migrating to cdma2000 1x service a month, racking up wireless Internet revenue to 7.9 billion won in end-October, compared with 800 million won in May.
In October, the country's wireless Internet service at large posted 23.1 billion won, 34 percent of which came from cdma2000 1x.
"Of cdma2000 1x users, 68.7 percent or 2.39 million subscribers are actually using the wireless Internet," the ministry said.
(insight@koreaherald.co.kr)
By Yang Sung-jin Staff reporter
2001.12.19 |
