Progress toward 4G Mobile Service in South Korea

The Joongang Daily has a nice summary of the nation's progress toward full-scale 4G (fourth generation) mobile service, accompanied by a summary graphic (click to see a larger version of the graphic).  As the article notes,with a data transfer speed of 100 megabytes per second, 4G services allow users to enjoy higher-speed Internet and services that couldn’t be handled by 3G, including high-quality multimedia support such as HD and 3-D video streaming and network games.

The article suggests that KT is lagging in 4G deployment which, strictly speaking, is not an accurate characterization. Rather, KT chose to build out its WiBro network before investing heavily in LTE. WiBro itself, developed in Korea, is a legitimate 4G service, even if a bit slower than LTE.

The iPhone's Impact on Mobile Networks in Korea, the U.S. and Britain

Having spent the past year or more reading the laments of Korea's mobile service providers and others here about low levels of data usage, and knowing that this country probably has more unused 3G network capacity than any other nation in the world, it is interesting to read about the woes of AT&T in the U.S., and now O2, one of the leading mobile service providers in the United Kingdom.

As outlined in a PC World article, O2 in Britain has now joined AT&T in the United States in blaming the "excessive data demands" of the iPhone for crippling the network!   If in fact, the U.S. and British networks are not capable of handling the data load, then Korea, with its advanced and under-utilized networks should be in an enviable situation.   The PC World article does note that some reports suggest that the iPhone itself may be the cause of problems and complaints in major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York.

From a consumer standpoint, the best outcome will be to build robust, high speed data networks (WiBro comes to mind here) rather than laying the blame on consumers who happen to like using mobile broadband!