South Korea’s government has high hopes for WiBro

A new mobile wireless technology favored by the South Korean government could pave the way for new wireless services for millions of users in Asia and Eastern Europe, a South Korean government official said last week.

The South Korean government believes WiBro (Wireless Broadband) services will become the mobile equivalent of broadband DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) connections and the standardization of the technology later this year could help international adoption, said Lee Keun-Hyeob, director general of the Radio Research Laboratory at South Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC).

WiBro offers 3Mbps download speeds at distances up to 1 kilometer from an access point for devices traveling at up to 60 kilometers per hour, Lee said.

It’s based on the same technology as the WiMax family of technologies that come under IEEE 802.16. WiMax, which is being pushed by Intel and others, is a wide-area wireless networking technology that promises to deliver wireless broadband access over a range significantly greater than that of IEEE 802.11 WLAN (wireless LAN) technology. Commercial WiMax trials are being conducted in a number of countries, including the U.S., New Zealand, and the U.K. and services using WiMax are planned in 2006 in Singapore, Japan, and the U.S., with the U.S. service being provided by AT&T.

“WiBro is WiMax plus mobility. If you look at WiMax, you see very big access points and it’s fixed and you can’t use it on the move,” Lee said. “We decided we wanted mobility and, as the expression goes, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.'”

Earlier this year, three South Korean operators KT, SK Telecom Co., and Hanaro Telecom received licences from the MIC to start commercial WiBro services. However, in April Hanaro cancelled its plans to launch a service, citing saturation in South Korea’s broadband market.

Despite this setback, commercial WiBro services will debut in South Korea in June 2006 and the technology is expected to attract 9 million subscribers in the country by 2011, according to the MIC.

MIC is hoping for bigger things for WiBro once the international IEEE 802.16e standard for the technology is approved in October, said Wee Kyu-Jin, director of the Radio Research Laboratory’s Regulation Research Department.

Vendor support for WiBro should follow standardization, and this should help promote the technology outside South Korea. For example, Intel is very interested in the technology, and is working with Samsung Electronics Co. to promote it, he said.

“Our expectation is that Asian and Eastern European countries will be markets because the investment (needed for WiBro) is less than that needed for 3G (third-generation) cellular networks,” Wee said. “For cellular networks, WiBro may offer complementary data services.”

Intel is working with companies and governments globally to accelerate the adoption of 802.16e and to harmonize WiBro with the proposed mobile version of WiMax technology, according to Amy Martin, a U.S.-based spokeswoman for the company. Intel plans to ship chips supporting the 802.16e standard after the standard is approved, she said.

But WiMax, whether offered in its fixed or mobile versions, may have a hard time becoming a widely used technology outside of South Korea, according to analysts.

For one thing, the technology faces resistance from many mobile carriers, particularly those that have already paid billions of dollars to governments to obtain licences for 3G networks, and they will not want to make investments in parallel networks that offer a competing technology to their existing networks, according to Allen Leibovitch, program manager for Wireless and Consumer Semiconductors at IDC.

Intel is a powerful force pushing the technology and wants to put WiMax into its future Centrino chips for notebook PCs, he said. But reluctance from carriers looks like it’s going to limit WiMax’s availability, he said.

WiBro will have a market in South Korea, but the delay in settling the mobile WiMax standard means that vendors will first concentrate on producing fixed WiMax products, according to Song Sauk-Hun, a principal analyst at Gartner in South Korea.