By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
A South Korea-driven wireless communication technology, Mobile WiMax, has been approved as a global standard by an international telecommunications organization, raising hopes for more exports of related equipment and fatter royalties income.
The Ministry of Information and Communications said Friday that the International Telecommunication Union approved the Mobile WiMax platform as the sixth IMT-2000 3G telecommunications standard, in its general meeting in Geneva, Thursday (local time).
The decision will make Mobile WiMax a more attractive solution when nations or mobile service companies build high-speed wireless networks. The market has the potential to expand to 94 trillion won over the next five years, the ministry said.
``This is a good news for the government and the whole nation,'' said Song Yu-jong, chief of the ministry's Radio and Broadcasting Strategic Planning Bureau. ``This is the first time for a Korean-developed technology to be recognized as a global standard, and it will help Korea keep its international image as an IT powerhouse.''
WiMax is short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, and is better known as WiBro (Wireless Broadband) in South Korea. Unlike the Wi-Fi wireless Internet technology, which is widely used in public places such as schools, offices and coffee shops, the WiMax transmission antenna covers a wider area and is capable of sending and receiving data to and from fast-moving cars and trains.
It has been one of the competing technologies for the faster mobile Internet and voice call networks, often referred to as third generation (3G). South Korea has played a main role in developing the technology with the ministry, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Samsung Electronics, Korea Telecom and Posdata having made serious investments, as well as several foreign firms such as Intel and Motorola.
The firms welcomed the news but remained guarded about its impact. They say that what really matters in the business is the market's reaction, and they may have to wait for a few years to be assured of success.
``We believe that the situation will become favorable from next year and the market will mature around 2010,'' said a Posdata official. ``But apparently, the pie is getting bigger. Foreign countries and mobile service firms are now more likely to pick WiMax as their 3G network platform.''
WiMax has yet to reach fruition. According to the government, there should be millions of people using the service in South Korea this year. But in reality, only around 67,000 were subscribing to it as of last month.
In the United States, its third-largest mobile carrier Sprint has promised to spend $5 billion in building a WiMax network in the eastern part of the country with equipment provided by Samsung Electronics and others. But critics say the system does not have any big advantages over other similar technologies such as HSPA, which already has a considerable consumer base in many countries.
The lack of a ``killer application'' is another reason why consumers are so far paying little attention to WiMax. One idea is to allow firms to use the network for mobile voice calls, which will enable Korea Telecom to easily join the mobile telephony market. Existing mobile carriers, naturally, oppose the plan.
On the promising side, WiMax equipment manufacturers and the government say that the quality of the network will greatly improve from next year when more innovative technologies are deployed. The so-called ``Wave 2'' transmitters will use multiple transmission antennas at the same time, and ``smart'' antennas will automatically focus the radio beams to the the direction where the data traffic is the heaviest, a Samsung executive said.