Qualcomm and Teleepoch
Enter Into a 3G CDMA Subscriber Unit License Agreement, October
6, 2007
MTN chooses Cambridge Broadband
Networks for multi-service wireless network in Rwanda, October 6,
2007
Brazilian government to
publish 3G bidding rules soon, October 6, 2007
KTF 3G service suffers
from technical problems, October 6, 2007
Argentina’s Personal
lunches 3G service in Rosario, October 6, 2007
Russia has it's first 3G
network, October 6, 2007
AT&T could drop Alcatel-Lucent
as 3G mobile network supplier, October 6, 2007
Enea Extends License Agreement
with ZTE for 3G Handsets, October 2, 2007
LG to unveil premium handsets
in Brazil, October 2, 2007
KTF 3G subscribers doubled
in less than 3 months, October 2, 2007
3G policy in India will
be non-uniform, October 2, 2007
- previous news
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SK Telecom Sticks With W-CDMA
November 10, 2003 - source: BWCS
South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom has refuted reports that it is
dropping plans to launch a W-CDMA network. In a report Monday’s Financial
Times a senior source at SK Telecom was quoted as saying that the deployment
of W-CDMA was “under review”. However the company has denied that this
meant that it would dump the European 3G standard but rather that it would
not make any firm decisions on the scale of its W-CDMA rollout until next
year. SK Telecom will go ahead with the introduction of W-CDMA services
in the capital, Seoul, at the end of this year.
Despite the fact that SK Telecom has reiterated its support for W-CDMA
there seems little doubt that South Korea’s largest mobile operator has
some significant concerns over the cost of deploying the 3G technology
on a national scale. In its original timetable SK Telecom had planned
to launch W-CDMA services in 32 cities by May 2002, with national coverage
in place by the end of 2003. However, like other mobile operators, the
company has slowly pushed back its commercial launch dates and is adopting
a wait-and-see approach.
SK Telecom is closely monitoring the progress of early W-CDMA services,
such as those launched by Hutchison 3G in the UK and Italy, to determine
its own 3G strategy. This cautious stance comes in stark contrast to SK
Telecom’s trailblazing approach to the introduction of CDMA2000 1xRTT
and 1xEV-DO. It has be offering CDMA2000 services since mid-2000 and now
more than 40% of its 18 million subscribers are signed up to 1xRTT or
EV-DO services.
So why doesn’t SK Telecom continue its CDMA2000 migration to EV-DV (data
and voice) and ignore W-CDMA? According to the operator the crucial issue
is its increasingly crowded radio spectrum. The success of CDMA2000 mobile
data services is putting an increasing strain on SK Telecom’s spectrum
resources. A move to EV-DV would do little to alleviate this problem but
its W-CDMA licence brings with it valuable additional spectrum. For this
reason it seems likely that W-CDMA will initially be deployed in South
Korea’s major cities where the spectrum bottleneck is most acute. How
far and fast it will be rolled out beyond this will depend very much on
how W-CDMA performs in other markets over the next 12 months.
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3G Motorola A920
