By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
South Koreans have always prided themselves for being tech savvy. Now their northern neighbors are looking to show off some skills of their own at the three-day Pyongyang summit.
Communication has been a problem for South Korean policymakers and businessmen on their trips to the North, with the communist country’s outdated telephone system and heavy security measures grinding everything down to a slower pace.
However, the South Korean delegation accompanying President Roh Moo-hyun won’t be reduced to relying on Luddite methods with the North Korean hosts offering mobile telephony services and high-speed Internet.
North Korea first experimented with a wireless network in 2002, with the help of Thailand-based Loxley Pacific, but banned the use of mobilephones in 2004.
Before the ban, about 1,000 North Koreans had been using the GSM handsets provided by the joint venture between the state telecommunications A North Korean policeman curiously looks at his companion's cellular phone at Changgwang Street in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this file photo, dated November, 2003. department and the Thai company.
For the Pyongyang summit, North Korea will provide the South Korean delegation with 30 wireless handsets, allowing officials to stay in touch at any time within the Pyongyang venues.
The South Koreans will also have Internet access during their stay in the North, a huge step forward from the days when the delegates could communicate back home only through a designated fixedline connection between Pyongyang and Seoul.
“We are talking with the North Korean officials to find technical ways to enhance Internet speed. If possible, we will have about 12 lines,” said Lee Jae-joung, South Korea’s Unification Minister.
In past inter-Korean meetings held in the North, journalists covering the events were forced to make international calls to China and use the network to relay their text and images to the South, which proved to be a costly and complicated process.
This is the first time that any South Korean delegation will have direct Internet contact in the North.
“So it is possible for a South Korean official to make a call from the Koryo Hotel to another delegate at the Paekhwawon State Guest House, check if everything is okay, then file a report to the South through the Internet,” said a Cheong Wa Dae official.
“He will then monitor the news reports from South Korean correspondents through the televisions at the media room at the hotel,” he said.