KT excels in WiBro; SKT best in 3G

By Kim Tong-hyung

Staff reporter

South Korean computer users are asked to pay a premium for their high-speed Internet, but a government report backs their grumblings that the Web pages are indeed loading a little too slowly.

The Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, Tuesday announced the results of its investigation on the quality of the country's mobile telephony, broadband and wireless Internet services in all Korean cities and towns to the ``dong'' (neighborhood) level.

Although the report was rather generous in its review of the third-generation (3G) cellular and mobile data services provided here, sparing industry giants KT and SK Telecom from embarrassment, it also suggested that consumers are not getting even half the speed they are paying for in broadband services.

KT, LG Telecom and SK Broadband, the fixed-line unit of SK Telecom, are the country's leading broadband Internet providers, while cable television operators C&M and CJ HelloVision also have high-speed Internet market share.

Although these companies promise data download speeds of around 100 megabits per second (Mbps) or faster, the average user will likely experience an Internet speed of just one-third of that, KCC officials said.

``Conventional broadband services promise speeds of around 100 Mbps, but when clocked at households, the connections appear to move data at around 30 Mbps or slower,'' said Lee Jae-beom, an official from the KCC's customer protection division.

LG Telecom's broadband service topped the list both in download and upload speeds, averaging 27.9 Mbps and 33.2 Mbps respectively across its service areas, while C&M and CJ HelloVision were found to be providing the slowest ``high-speed'' Internet services by significant margins.

The broadband service of KT, the country's largest Internet provider, averaged a speed of 14.2 Mbps in downloads, but just 9.7 Mbps in uploads, according to the KCC report. KT's broadband coverage reaches more than 97 percent of the nation's entire service areas, compared to LG Telecom's 65.9 percent.

There are a variety of reasons that could explain the inconsistency between the 100 Mbps promised in marketing slogans and the more modest speeds witnessed at household monitors, the KCC said.

``A broadband Internet provider could be providing a connectivity capable of hitting 100 Mbps, but this hardly matters when the lines used by Internet companies, which operate the Web sites the users are looking at, fail to match this potential speed,'' Lee said.

``The Internet speeds experienced by computer users could only be determined by the speed Internet companies are providing, and there could be business benefits for them in spending to acquire more bandwidth and make their sites upload quicker and enable downloads to be faster.''

SK Telecom, the country's largest mobile telephony operator, topped the list in 3G voice services with its 97.8 percent success rate of calls edging KT's 96.3 percent. For video calls, SK Telecom's connection rate was 96.9 percent, followed by KT's 95.3 percent and LG Telecom's 88.4 percent. In 3G data connectivity, SK Telecom's 97.8 percent success rate bested KT's 96.9 percent and LG Telecom's 88.4 percent.

KT and SK Telecom are also the operators of the portable Internet service, WiBro (wireless broadband), the local variant of mobile WiMAX that is competing with Long Term Evolution (LTE) in the 4G standard wars.

Although KT is crushing SK Telecom in terms of WiBro coverage, it seems that SK Telecom is providing the faster service. KT is providing WiBro to 84 cities across the nation to more than 287,000 customers, while SK Telecom only has 32,000 users.

SK Telecom's WiBro service averaged 2.11 Mbps in download speeds, significantly faster than the 1.76 Mbps provided by KT's rival service.