Intel to Invest $20 million in Korean WiBRO Venture

As reported by Reuters and other media outlets, Intel will invest $20 million in a wireless broadband joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Korea Telecom, and Korea's National Pension Service.  The joint venture was announced last May by KT, with capital of $280.9 million.   It will expand South Korea's mobile WiMax coverage to 82 cities by March of next year, covering 85 percent of the nation's population.

The expansion is part of KT's effort to cope with surging data traffic following introduction of Apple's iPhone in late November of last year.

Connecting at London's Heathrow versus Hong Kong International

On my recent trip to Barclona, I experienced the dramatically different approach that two of the world's airports have to wireless internet access, a convenience sought by an increasing number of world travelers. While Heathrow Airport in London sought to entice users to pay one euro for ten minutes of internet access, Hong Kong International Airport provided it for free and even offered a service to charge your notebook or netbook.Needless to say, I think Heathrow has missed the boat on this one. Eventually I

suspect that they will come to see the value of providing airport-wide free access to the internet and the short sighted nature of their attempts to "nickel and dime" any customer passing through the airport.

The two pictures embedded with this post tell the whole story. Just click on the thumbnails to the left to see a larger version of the picture.

Note that the first picture is from an internet area at Heathrow and contains the chairs with "Internet Here!" on the background. The screen displaying "free access" in this picture is intended to entice users for what is really a paid access service. A link on it leads to a small set of public service pages.

The Mobile Internet is Coming: Korean Web Portals Target Mobile Phones

There is a very interesting article in today's Korea Times, detailing how major web portals in Korea are now targeting mobile phones by formatting their material for handsets.   They include

• http://m.naver.com (a new arrival)


• www.daum.net (since January)


• www.cyworld.com (Mini-cyworld last December)


• mini.paran.com (Paran, the internet unit of KT Wednesday of this week)

As the article points out, traffic to mobile portals remains miniscule as most wireless users (including yours truly) won't touch their expensive data services.  However, as it concludes, all of this will change with the arrival of the iPhone and Android phones into the Korean market.  As noted in an earlier post the mobile market worldwide is shifting not just to smartphones, narrowly conceived, but to hand-held computers with flat rates for accessing the internet.  The sooner South Korea joins this trend the better for its consumers and exporters of mobile phones.