Coverage, service limitations hurting mobile WiMAX growth in Korea

Korea Telecom’s mobile WiMAX-based service, called WiBRO, is lagging behind competing cellular services using 3G and HSDPA due to limited coverage and lack of compelling services, says an international market research house. 

“The wider coverage of WCDMA is a competitive advantage over WiBRO,” said Andy Bae, senior analyst based in Seoul for ABI Research, adding that, “mobile WiMAX/WiBRO needs more compelling applications to attract subscribers.”

According to Bae, KT has rolled out WiBRO infrastructure in the Seoul area only; hence its appeal remains marginal for consumers.  “First of all, KT should extend their service coverage,” he said. “Many customers have said: ‘WiBRO is not a full service.’ That damages the service. Consumer awareness is very low. Currently, they should develop some differentiating factor to become competitive against HSDPA.” 

For its part, KT has developed some enterprise applications for WiBRO, such as video conferencing, but this will take some time to proliferate, Bae said. 

In terms of network performance, WiBRO currently offers three times the performance of commercial HSDPA services on the uplink, but data speed for the downlink is similar, Bae revealed.