SK Telecom Co. Ltd., South Korea’s largest cellular operator, has completed test trials of third-generation services, which it expects to offer to the public at the 2002 World Cup in Seoul.
Believing IMT-2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications) is crucial to its success, the Code Division Multiple Access operator began researching and developing the technology in 1994. In September 1996, South Korea’s Ministry of Information and Telecommunications allocated 20 megahertz of frequency for SK Telecom’s testing efforts.
A myriad of third-generation technologies are on the table for IMT-2000 consideration; many incorporate wideband CDMA technology. The International Telecommunications Union, the United Nations’ telecommunications arm, has laid out a set of generic requirements for global third-generation technology, IMT-2000, which calls for the introduction of sophisticated multimedia services such as high-speed Internet access and full-motion video.
SK Telecom has opted to push ahead with a wideband CDMA third-generation system that incorporates Interim Standard 95, or cdmaOne, technology for backward compatibility and a solution adopted by NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cellular operator. DoCoMo announced its intention earlier this year to develop its own version of WCDMA, bypassing Qualcomm Inc.’s intellectual property rights to cdmaOne technology. With input from large manufacturers like L.M. Ericsson and Nokia Corp., which advocate this version of WCDMA, DoCoMo expects a test system by 1998. SK Telecom and DoCoMo plan to jointly develop commercial systems by 2000 and start a test service between Korea and Japan in 2001. SK Telecom said it verified wireless video and Internet access through test demonstrations of the IMT-2000 network. Currently, IMT-2000 handsets can transmit and receive multimedia data and information at 128 kilobits-per-second over SK Telecom’s network. The carrier plans to triple that speed to 384 kbps by the end of the year, and further up the speed to 2 Mbps by the end of 1998.
