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whowiredunieditNo. 3 mobile service provider LG U+ has received rave reviews for its decision to open up its Wi-Fi U+ Zones. Since the company allowed its 80,000 U+ Zones in February, it has gained more than twice more members as before.
Seoul, Korea¶ May 30, 2012 -- Korea’s mobile telecom service providers have been upgrading their Wi-Fi network quality significantly. Given that Wi-Fi can relieve the traffic load of mobile networks and would help the companies sign up corporate subscribers , it is expected the major service providers will accelerate the service quality upgrade.
For example, SK Telecom said on May 29 that it has tripled the speed of access points installed in Seoul metropolitan subway stations. To that end, the company added the 5-gigahertz bandwidth to the 2.4-gigahertz-only access points. After the upgrade, the capacity has increased by fourfold with an actual speed gain of three times.
KT, meanwhile, has installed a total of 190,000 access points everywhere in the country including subway stations, subway cars, call taxis, and river taxis, the world’s highest number of access point installation for a single service provider. Last month, the company attached access points in 1,100 buses operated in the metropolitan Seoul area.
No. 3 mobile service provider LG U+ has received rave reviews for its decision to open up its Wi-Fi U+ Zones. Since the company allowed its 80,000 U+ Zones in February, it has gained more than twice more members as before.
A telecom industry analyst said, “Currently there is so much inconvenience on the part of the average user to use the wireless Internet on 3G networks especially in high-traffic areas. Mobile telecom service providers are responding to this bottleneck with a large-scale deployment of access points.”
A manager at a telecom company said, “Even though LTE (long-term evolution) services are faster, most users still rely on 3G services, which is why most of them want to take advantage of high-speed wireless Internet. We are investing heavily in Wi-Fi networks because we reckon this is what makes us more competitive in terms of gaining more members.”
According to U.S. telecom consultancy Infonetics, the worldwide Wi-Fi equipment market has grown 35 percent in 2011 and is forecast to become a $2.1-billion market in 2016.
Sean Chung (press@whowired.com)
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