South Korea officials say the country’s mobile WiMax licenses should be revoked and other sanctions imposed because the country is not getting the rollout citizens were promised, Light Reading reports.
In 2005, Korea Telecom, primarily a landline phone/broadband company, along with Hanaro Telecom (now SK Broadband), and SK Telecom (a cellular operator with 50% market share), received licenses for WiBro, although Hanaro returned its license in the same year.
The companies agreed to invest $1 billion on infrastructure, and the government set a target of 1.4 million subscribers by 2009. South Korea launched Mobile WiMAX in 2006, but the rollout has been slow — especially with SK Telecom, which probably prefers a cellular-centric, HSPA solution.
To date, KT and SKT still have $200 million to $300 million in capex left to invest, says Tae-Hyung Kim, Asia/Pacific analyst at Pyramid Research.
As of the end of June, KT had 218,454 WiBro subscribers, according to the company’s figures. SKT does not publish its WiBro subscriber numbers separately, but Kim believes the number stood at just 20,000 in April this year, although the company has a target of 100,000 by the end of the year.
KT has improved takeup recently with a 29 percent rise in revenues quarter-on-quarter. The company’s CFO, Yeon-Hak Kim, KT expects the growth trend to continue in the second half of the year, when notebooks embedded with both WiBro and WiFi technology are introduced.
Despite such improvements, WiBro is very much the bridesmaid to HSPA’s bride, says Unstrung. As of the end of June, Korea had just shy of 22 million HSPA subscribers, according to Wireless Intelligence, some 47 percent of the total mobile subscriber base.
WiBro coverage is limited to Seoul and its surrounding areas, whereas HSPA is nationwide. But, according to Unstrung, Pyramid’s Kim says even if the operators completed their promised investments, nationwide coverage is out of the question. “Depending on the amount of the fine, I personally think operators would prefer to have WiBro licenses revoked just to get done with the issue, he suggests.”
He also believes the government will not follow through on its threat to rescind the licenses: “After spending a huge sum in paying royalties to Qualcomm for [CDMA] 2G networks, the government tried to develop a home-grown technology — WiBro — that vendors could export, rather than import. The government created a WiBro hype that pushed a lot of local SMEs into investing in it, so it can’t back off WiBro now, even if it knows that WiBro doesn’t make much business sense at this point.”
The decision on government action will rest with the Korea Communications Committee, and it’s not clear when it will make a ruling on the issue.
Flagship WiMAX operators include:
- Clearwire Communications launched CLEAR’s 4G service in Las Vegas this July, the third major market that Clear has launched under its own name. Atlanta launched Clear’s Mobile WiMAX on June 16th and Portland in January. Sprint Nextel’s XOHM-branded Baltimore market is expected to come under Clear’s wing sometime this year. In 2009 Clear is also expected to launch in Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth and Philadelphia, and convert existing pre-WiMAX markets in Seattle, Honolulu and Charlotte, N.C., to mobile WiMAX. Clearwire has some 500,000 subscribers, but most use earlier pre-WiMAX gear.
- The WiMAX Forum forecasts that India will have 19 million WiMAX subscribers by 2012, or 20% of the world’s WiMAX user base while Gartner says India will have 6.9 Million mobile and fixed WiMAX connections by the End of 2011. According to the WiMAX Forum, India’s spectrum auction will enable two 20 MHz blocks in both the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz bands. Indian state-owned operators, BSNL or MTNL, have had early access to 3.5 GHz WiMAX spectrum ahead of coming auctions in the 2.1 and 2.5 GHz bands. BSNL WiMAX is expanding throughout India’s fastest-growing telecom circles: Gujarat, Maharashstra and Goa, and Andhra Pradesh. Tata Communications (TCL) has signed up 50,000 subscribers for its fixed WiMAX service in the 3.3 GHz band.
- Japan’s UQ Communications launched commercial service on July 1 and plans to cover Japan in the next few years. UQ is the first major mobile WiMAX operator to use fractional frequency reuse, which can eliminate typical ‘3-frequency’ operation. UQ is the only company that has a nationwide approach for their 2.5 GHz spectrum and expects to have more than 90 percent population coverage by 2012. Partner cellco KDDI (with a 35% share), will start their LTE build-out in 2012.
- Russia’s Yota Mobile WiMAX network is now offering services in three regions, including Moscow and St Petersburg, and claims it is carrying more data already than all the cellcos combined. Yota’s WiMAX system is using Samsung base stations exclusively. Other WiMax networks are being launched in various regions in Russia by Enfortas, Synterra, Start-Telecom, Comstar-UTS, and Media-Net.
- Korea Telecom is rolling out voice-over-WiBro this year. KT’s Wave 2 network is expected to start commercial operation in July while SK Telecom is targeting September. KT, which controls more than 90 percent of the fixed-line telephony market and about 44 percent of the broadband sector, had gathered about 206,000 customers for WiBro by the middle of 2008, while SK Telecom, the dominant cellular carrier, has a comparatively miniscule 2,000 WiBro subscribers. The country helped to define the Mobile standard and vendors like Samsung are based in South Korea.
- The National Communications Commission (NCC), Taiwan’s regulator, has given the go ahead to VMAX to start rolling out WiMAX base stations and related infrastructure in its licensed areas in the island’s northern region, with full commercial launch in Q3 of this year. The Taiwanese operator is deploying about 300 WiMAX base stations from Alvarion and Samsung with an initial budget of $29m. VMAX is expected to use a total of 1,200 base stations in the planned three-stage project.
Intel has poured nearly $2 billion into 18 WiMax companies in recent years.
Today Clearwire reported 2nd quarter 2009 results that the company says were on track to deliver more than 25 markets by the end of 2009. Clearwire reports 12,000 net subscription adds for Q2, down from 25,000 for Q1. Portland probably accounts for the bulk of the signups, since Las Vegas and Atlanta didn’t launch until end of Q2. Clearwire now reports a total of 511,000 WiMAX subscribers.
Clearwire expects their total network coverage in both legacy and 4G markets to reach over 40 million people by the end of 2009. The 2009 additions will include Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth and Philadelphia, along with the migration of pre-WiMAX markets like Seattle, Charlotte and Honolulu. Clear expects to offer 4G service in markets covering 30 million people at the end of this year and 120 million across 80 U.S. markets by the end of 2010.
Related Dailywireless articles include; Nokia Wins China Contract, Big 3G & WiMAX Wins, China Makes Big 3G Move, Hong Kong 2.5 GHz Auction Winners, Tranzeo: Go for Indonesia WiMAX, China Expands the Largest Mobile Market, WiMax: East Meets West, India’s 3g/4G Auctions: Late January, Voice Added to WiBro, Japan Sub-channels WiMAX, Japan’s WiMAX Gets Going, WiMAX Global War in Japan, Japan Launching WiMAX Rival, European Commission: 3G/WiMAX Together on 2.6 GHz, European 2.5 GHz Auctions & the Global Market, KDDI & Willcom to WiMAX Japan, VSNL WiMaxes Bangalore, Battle for Britain, European 2.5 GHz Auctions & the Global Market, WiMax: East Meets West, Mobile WiMAX: Fast and Cheap or Out of Control?BT’s European WiMAX Plan, WiMAX Roundup, Australia Unwired, India 2nd Largest Mobile Market, Intel: $500M for M-Taiwan and Urban WiMAX in the UK.
