Korea to begin 3G services in 2003

date: February 22, 2002

Contrary to beliefs in the mobile industry, South Korea's mobile carriers will launch commercial 3G mobile services in 2003. SK IMT Co, a 3G unit of top mobile carrier SK Telecom Co, said in a statement, "We will launch a commercial 3G service in the third quarter of next year."

In a separate statement KT ICOM Co, a mobile unit of Korea's largest fixed-line telecom company KT Corp, said they would begin 3G services early next year. "We will select 3G telecoms equipment suppliers in the first half of this year and complete a pilot service test by year's end," it said.

LG Electronics Inc was chosen by KT ICOM early in February as the 3G network supplier for the demonstration of its next-generation mobile services during the 2002 World Cup final soccer games in May and June.

Both SK Telecom and KT will use the W-CDMA technology, same as Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo. LG Telecom Ltd., Korea's smallest mobile operator will operate 3G services based on Qualcomm's cdma2000 technology.

Some people in the industry said that SKT and KT were less than enthusiastic in deploying W-CDMA networks while instead they were upgrading their existing services to save costs. SKT and KT did conduct pilot tests of cdma2000 1x EV DO in a couple of places.

SKT said it would spend US$1.22 billion until 2005 on deploying W-CDMA 3G networks to offer a nationwide service by then.

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