| South Korea's government has announced that it
has allocated bandwidth for a new breed of portable internet service that will
be able to deliver a broadband connection to devices travelling at moderate
speeds.
The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) set aside some of spectrum
in the 2.3GHz band and said it plans to offer licences to three companies to
operate services using the frequencies.
The new system will be based on a technology called WiBro (Wireless Broadband),
which is part of the IEEE802.16 family of wireless internet specifications.
It is expected to offer a signal of around 1M-bps (bit per second) bandwidth
to devices travelling at up to 70 kilometres per hour.
WiBro is closely related to, but different from, the WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability
for Microwave Access) system that has been developed to send a higher-bandwidth
signal of several tens of megabits per second to fixed receivers over a distance
of several tens of kilometres.
The ministry said it hopes to see commercial services based on WiBro launched
sometime in 2006 and expects the market for such services to total 10 million
customers and be worth $3.7bn by 2011.
The licenses will be awarded in March next year, said the MIC.
According to local media reports, three companies have signalled their intent
to bid for the licences. They are; KT Corp., SK Telecom Co. Ltd. and Hanaro
Telecom Inc. A fourth company, Dacom Corp., had also intended to bid for a licence
but recently acquired fixed broadband internet supplier Thrunet Co. Ltd. and
now plans to concentrate its work in fixed-line services.
The government's spectrum allocation came on the same day the chief executive
officers of Intel Corp. and LG Electronics Inc. met in Seoul to discuss ways
to merge the WiBro and WiMax technologies and avoid market segmentation.
The two companies have reportedly decided to work together to create a single
international standard for wireless broadband internet access.
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