By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
Korean youngsters are now building homepages on their cell phones in addition to their Internet based ones, capitalizing on the nation's state-of-the-art mobile phone infrastructure.
Uniwis, the Seoul-based provider of solutions for cell phone-based homepages, or ``phone-pages,'' said Friday that the number of phone-page users is on the increase.
``We have upside of 10,000 subscribers to our phone-page services and most of them are active users,'' said a Uniwis official, who declined to be named.
``The number of phone-page lovers is likely to rocket thanks to the wireless environment that supports fast data transmission and the mobile Internet,'' he said.
Up to 42 million of the country's overall 49 million population carry cell phones that mostly have access to wireless Internet services.
Users of the mobile-friendly version of Web pages are capable of decorating their personalized phone-pages with their favorite images and text.
``The most outstanding advantage of phone-pages is that people can use them anyplace anytime, which is impossible with homepages on the Web,'' the Uniwis official said.
People are however still reluctant to use mobile Internet services due to their high costs on handsets.
Yet, Uniwis officials said if wireless subscribers sign up for the fixed-rate data plan, they will have unlimited use of phone-page services.
Furthermore, the advent of the next-generation wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) will bring to life lightning-fast data services, a must for the successful take-off of the phone-page.
The country's leading wireless operators _ SK Telecom and KTF _ launched the data transmission-suitable W-CDMA in Seoul and its vicinity midway through last year.
They expanded the service areas to across the nation in March to attract more than 1.7 million users for W-CDMA, a third-generation platform.