By Yoon Sung-won
KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu has proposed China Mobile and Japanese phone provider NTT DoCoMo cooperate in a mobile transportation card system that can be used universally in the three countries, the company said Sunday.
At the Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement (SCFA), one of Asia’s largest telecom business communities, Hwang met with China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohwa and NTT DoCoMo CEO Kaoru Kato in Hangzhou, China, Friday, and discussed how best to collaborate over new telecom issues such as Internet of Things (IoT) standardization and smart energy management technology.
The nation’s second-largest mobile carrier said it anticipates that more than 900 million subscribers of the three mobile carriers can travel more easily between the three countries, which have the largest volume of tourist travel in Asia, once the proposal comes into reality.
“The SCFA aims at establishing a telecom smart belt in Northeast Asia that provides universal telecom services to Korean, Chinese and Japanese customers,” said Park Hae-jung, KT’s marketing division executive vice president. “We will strengthen our partnerships with China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo to provide services like the integrated mobile transportation card.”
The company said it has been the only local telecom company to provide the long-term evolution (LTE) data roaming service and the WiFi automatic roaming service both in China and Japan. It said the three companies will expedite the procedure to enable roaming phone calls over the LTE network among the three carriers.
KT also said it proposed China Mobile to apply an energy efficiency technology called “Building Energy Management System” to its offices after conducting a joint diagnosis project on the buildings.
The KT spokesman said, “Not many details are available now because the proposed cooperation is at an initial stage,” before adding that more details are likely to come out after the proposals shape up next year.