WiMax is officially deployed in Korea

The telecom companies are starting the Wibro service business, a variant of WiMax, in Seoul. This is considered to be the first opportunity to compare a wide range of wireless access systems with other competing technologies.

Some commercial wireless Internet services have been provided via hotspots in Seoul, but WiMax still has many advantages. It achieves data transfer rates of several megabits per second, 1 km range of coverage and can operate in vehicles moving at 120 km / h.

WiBro will initially be set up in the central area, the university and the main public transport routes in the city. The basic service fee offered by KT Communications is US $ 16 / month for the first 300 MB of downloadable data, with each subsequent megabyte costing US $ 0.07.

To use the service, customers will have to buy a card worth from $ 170 to $ 300 to install on a laptop. Cards that support other devices like PDAs and smartphones will be available in the next few months.

The main competitors of WiBro and mobile WiMax are high-speed HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) technology, an improvement from WCDMA technology for mobile phones. HSDPA has the same transfer rate as WiBro, but the rates may be slightly higher.

Korea's SK Telecom will invest US $ 170 million to build the WiBro network this year, while KT Corporation plans to spend US $ 500 million. " We will cover WiBro all over Seoul next year and expand to neighborhoods in 2008, " a KT spokesman said.