WiBro will complement HSDPA, says Korea's KISDI

Nick Lane, Informa

Operators around the world will be watching when KT launches WiBro services in June in South Korea, particularly incumbents such as BT, Telecom Italia and Sprint Nextel, which are already trialing the technology. WiBro is Korea's version of mobile WiMAX, so its deployment will provide the first indication of how successful the global mobile WiMAX market could be.

The government-backed Korean Information Strategy Development Institute has high hopes for WiBro, which will debut in field trials in 1H06. WiBro coverage will initially focus on urban areas where the demand for data service is high, with national coverage expected in 2009, Sung-Woon Cho, director of Telecommunications and Broadcasting Research Division at KISDI, said at the recent IDATE conference in France.

KISDI forecasts that WiBro services will have 5 million subscribers in 2009, at which point a WiBro MVNO will be introduced. And by 2011, Cho says there will be between 8 million and 11 million WiBro subscribers, and that the WiBro market will be worth between US$3.2 billion and US$3.7 billion. "But this figure will depend on the competition with emerging services, like WCDMA/HSDPA and DMB," he says.

Cho adds that WiBro is the way to stimulate a stagnant market. The fixed-broadband market has 11.3 million subscribers, but growth has been below 5% for three consecutive years, while KISDI claims that the mobile market has peaked with 37.2 million users.

The limited data speeds of mobile services and limited coverage of Wi-Fi have made the need for a solution such as WiBro all the more pressing, Cho says. "In Korea, we are trying to find new frontiers, and that will be wireless-broadband Internet," he says. "A new wireless Internet service with high speed and mobility is needed at reasonable prices."

SKT and KTF will both launch HSDPA in Seoul and metropolitan areas in 1H06, with local vendors Samsung and LG supplying the HSDPA handsets. But 80% of mobile users are on 1xRTT or 1xEV-DO, and Cho says EV-DO is not fast enough to boost mobile Internet's demands. This would also be the case for the early implementations of HSDPA, which, with the device limitations, will deliver speeds of just 1.8-3.6Mbps. Not only will this open the door for an additional technology, in this case WiBro, but it is also likely that the technologies will be differentiated by their service positioning (see fig.).

Fig: WiBro and HSDPA service comparison

"We believe that there are different markets for WiBro and WCDMA/HSDPA," Cho says. "WiBro is a simple network structure. It is directly connected to the IP backbone and designed for data services. It can provide voice services with bundling of mobile phone. But its differentiator is its data rate."

Cho says services that require only limited data transfers, such as SMS, ring-tone and wallpaper downloads, banking and trading, location-based services and video telephony, will become WCDMA/HSDPA-based, while shopping, file transfers, video-on-demand and music-on-demand, e-mail, MMS and IM, network gaming and game downloads will be more suited to WiBro. Web surfing, he says, will be suited to both technologies.

To make WiBro successful, Cho says KISDI will have to ensure interworking with existing wireless networks such as WCDMA/HSDPA and EV-DO, as well as 802.11a/g and 802.11n. But it will be a case of one step at a time.

Even so, the future of WiBro remains uncertain. Although it is a nascent technology, Cho says it will soon reach a crossroads, requiring a decision on whether it remains a fixed-nomadic solution with increasing higher peak rates similar to those expected of 4G (100MB-1GB), or becomes more of a mobile solution, such as VoIP, but at the expense of increased peak rates. Nevertheless, Cho believes that its evolution will be driven by market demand. "We don't know yet what will [be] people's choice, whether the technology is WiBro or HSDPA," he says.

For now, he says he hopes WiBro and HSDPA "will be the answer to our problems. HSDPA and WiBro are expected to create broadband wireless Internet market and will make 2006 a landmark year for establishing the stepping-stone of 4G," Cho says.