Fiber to the Home in the Mountains of Gangwon Province

Since 2004 my wife and I have enjoyed dependable DSL service, courtesy of Korea Telecom, at our small house in the mountains of Gangwon Province.  It was initially installed during a Winter snowstorm by a young KT technician (see my earlier post and photograph as proof).

After years of dependable DSL service, the modem provided by KT suddenly went dead two weekends ago.  We made an appointment for another technician to come out yesterday and I thought he would simply replace the DSL modem.  Instead, he climbed up to a box on a nearby telephone pole, strung fiber optic cable from it to our house, and connected KT's Fiber to The Home (FTTH) modem.  All of this took approximately an hour.   No charge for the service and no change to our current service, except that we're getting faster speeds on the fiber!

For the record, this is our most recent experience of customer service from one of Korea's major service providers.

KT to Seek Management Control of BC Card

In another symptom of the coming era of mobile broadband and ubiquitous networking, Korea Telecom has announced that it plans to buy a large stake in BC Card and eventually gain management control of the company.  According to the Joongang Daily, KT has already signed a memorandum of understanding to acquire Shinhan Card Co.'s 14.9 percent stake in BC Card (see graphic).  A spokesman for KT said that "We see a great possibility in creating synergy between telecommunication and finance."

An earlier post noted that e-business in Korea is mired in the past because of an overly-heavy reliance on Microsoft software, and legal requirements that led banks and other businesses to require the use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and active-X controls for internet transactions.   Obviously, Korea Telecom is looking beyond the present situation to a future in which most Korean consumers will use mobile broadband via iPhone, Android or other handsets.  There are currently over 24 million mobile phones equipped with USIM (universal subscriber identity module) chips which can identify subscribers and store various content, including credit card information.  In addition, KT is reportedly mulling over new services in which a customer might search for a restaurant using their smart phone, pinpoint its location, and pay the bill using a credit card and coupons downloaded to the smart phone from web sites.

The mobile broadband era is coming to Korea, and it is going to arrive very fast, for the simple reason that consumers want mobility and they want these services, just as in other advanced countries around the world.

Prosecutors Indict KT Officials for Receiving Kickbacks

There is so much money circulating in the telecommunications sector around the world that some call telecommunications "the modern-day license to mine gold."  Therefore, it was not a huge surprise to read today's reports that prosecutors have indicted KT officials for receiving kickbacks. As reported in The Korea Times, a district prosecution office in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, apprehended the staffers and dozens of subcontractors on suspicions of taking and providing bribes, indicting seven with physical detention and 47 without restriction.

In one case, a senior KT official allegedly received a bribe of 350 million won ($275,000) from a subcontractor between December 2004 and July 2006 in return for ignoring shoddy construction work and providing other ``favors.'' The KT officials received bribes regularly in return for awarding optical cable network and other construction orders to the subcontractors. They were given from 3 to 5 percent of the contract value, the prosecutors' office said.

Korea Telecom CEO Proposes Revamping the KCC

As reported by The Korea Times, Lee, Suk Chae, Chairman and CEO of Korea Telecom said last week that The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) might not be the right organization to guide the country's information technology policies forward.  While talking with panelists at a weekly forum of the National Strategy Institute, he suggested that the KCC's committee-based decision-making structure makes it less effective as a developer of national IT strategies than its predecessor, the Ministry of Information and Communication.  "The KCC is a meaningful organization, but it is based on the wrong fundamental philosophy," he said.  Furthermore,

``The KCC was planned as a neutral, independent agency, but now the body that even has commissioners named from opposition political parties now have the power to regulate IT. Communications is part of administration, and should not be a commission-based organization, and this has to be changed.''

The KCC was inaugurated last year as the country's first converged regulator for telecommunications and broadcasting. Currently, a committee of five, including the KCC chairman and four commissioners, two of them named by the ruling political party and the other two by the opposition, is empowered to make decisions.

``The vice chairman post rotates from the commissioners selected from the ruling political party and the opposition. This means that the leader of the opposition party can become vice commissioner and have the rights to attend administrative meetings, which is not right,'' Lee said.