Korea gets in first with nascent 3G mobile service
By Nam In-soo and Eric Auchard
SEOUL(Reuters) - If you want a taste of the much anticipated arrival of third-generation mobile phones, look not to Japan, but to Korea, which has a one-year jump on its neighbor in offering the latest phones capable of swapping video and data.
The mobile future works, judging from the nearly 1.2 million South Korean consumers chatting and swapping pictures on phones that use an alternative to the technology that NTT DoCoMo, the fast-growing mobile sensation, plans to offer this week in Japan.
High-tech theologians may debate whether South Korea's new services are "true 3G" since they are based on a different technology to the one that more than 100 countries are gearing up to use around the globe, but customers see no difference.
On a Seoul subway, it's common to see teenaged girls and young women kill time by playing games, downloading pictures and exchanging messages using flashy color-screen mobile phones.
The appeal stretches to new picture-phone features that allow friends to see each other while they gossip.
"I spend about 30 minutes a day using my mobile phone to play games," said Kyong Jin-a, 23, who belongs to a group selected by KTF , one of Korea's three mobile carriers, to study the novel ways consumers are using the new phones.
"Personally, I like to download digital photos onto my screen, which takes one to one-and-a-half minutes. That's pretty fast, I think," she said, referring to informal snapshots she has taken.
The graphic features go well beyond the voice and text messaging of Kyong's old phone. She used to swap about 100 short messages a month with her friends, but now can also share photos.
Her service provider, KTF, is Korea's second-largest mobile operator. It began cdma2000 1x services in major cities in July.
All three South Korean carriers now offer the new services, nicknamed "1x".
SK Telecom, the market leader with half of South Korea's almost 28 million mobile subscribers, has converted nearly one million, or 7 percent, of those subscribers to the upgraded system since it started its 1x service in October.
1x was developed by Qualcomm of the U.S. and is a 3G technology that allows graphics or digital music to be picked off the Internet.
The technology boasts CD-quality sound and data transmission at a top rate of 144 Kilobits per second, according to the International Telecommunications Union.
PREVIEW OF 3G WORLDWIDE
"There's been a very fast uptake of 1x," said Matt Hocker, a technology analyst for investment bank UBS Warburg in London.
Hocker was in Seoul this week to attend a UBS conference that studied the Korean mobile market as a model for other markets.
"We're using Korea as a test case for new services in Europe," he said.
"The success of 1x here is likely to push 3G out (in Korea)," he added, raising the possibility that network operators might settle for using 1x and postpone an upgrade to pure 3G technology.
While consumers elsewhere may wait for years to see such services -- the United States, for example, has not even scheduled the airwave auctions necessary to build the higher capacity networks -- mobile operators are counting on Korea and Japan to justify the huge investments they are making in such multimedia networks.
Still, despite the much-hyped high speeds that 1x offers, Korean mobile carriers admit that data transmission is in reality slower than the promised 144 Kbps.
"Actually, the speed is around 60 to 80 Kbps, depending on how many users are trying to get on the system," said Lim Byeong-yong, vice president of the corporate strategy team at LG Telecom.
LG, the smallest of Korea's three mobile carriers, began its 1x service in May.
NTT DoCoMo has had to live with lowered expectations of its own after software glitches and a shortage of new phones capable of handling faster data rates forced the Japanese carrier to delay introduction of its 3G services to October 1 from last May.
YOUTH MARKET PROVES BIGGEST AUDIENCE
LG's Lim said the biggest market for its latest phones is made up of young subscribers in their teens and 20s, who account for fully 50 percent of its 1x users.
"A 30-year-old user may be our client for 30 years or 40 years from now. But teenagers and young people are potential subscribers for 60 years or more," he said. "So our marketing, naturally, is focused on younger generations."
LG, which won a 3G licence in August, said it would move on to an advanced service based on Qualcomm's technology to offer more sophisticated applications, including streaming video, at a rate of several megabits per second.
"We plan to launch a genuine 3G service in the second half of next year or early 2003 at the latest," said Lim.
SK Telecom and KFT, which won 3G licenses last December, also plan to offer enhanced services using W-CDMA technology, favored by DoCoMo and Finland's Nokia, late next year or in 2003.
Mobile carriers' 1x service users as of end-August+:
1x SUBSCRIBERS MARKET SHARE
SK Telecom 980,000 14,114,836 50.6
KTF 142,595 9,454,788 33.83
LG Telecom 60,000 4,349,073 15.57
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Total 1,182,595 27,918,697 100
NOTE: Data from Ministry of Information and Communication;
1x figures are estimates provided by companies.
14:45 10-03-01
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. |
