With broadband already at high penetration rates throughout South Korea, service providers are rapidly evolving their networks to offer differentiated services, said Dr. Won-sic Hahn, Managing Director, Fixed-Mobile Convergence Business Department, KT (Korea Telecom), speaking at the Broadband Wireless World 2003 conference in San Jose, California. KT has introduced a new consumer service that combines home DSL access with WLAN connectivity. For an additional monthly fee, the "NESPOT" service provides DSL subscribers with a home wireless LAN as well as unlimited access to KT's public hotspots. The user is provided with a single ID and password for both home connectivity and the public hotspots. KT already has 8,500 hotspots in operation across Korea in cafes, subway stations, airports, hospitals, school campuses and stores. Private companies are also encouraged to offer the service in their public lobbies. KT plans to have 16,000 WLAN hotspots in service by the end of 2003. KT currently has about 166,000 subscribers for the service and is adding about 1,500 new users per day. NESPOT subscribers can use Internet phone and messaging services. Rival Hanaro Telecom and others are launching their own hotspots services. South Korea currently has about 32 million mobile phone subscribers, of which 24 million use mobile Internet service. Dr. Hahn said a new opportunity exists for bridging traffic and subscribers from the 2.5/3G network to the public WLAN infrastructure. KT is working on a single-password "NESPOT Swing" service that enables advanced mobile phones and PDAs to seamlessly access either the CDMA 1xEVDO infrastructure or WLAN hotspots. The service is likely to be used for downloading video clips, music, photos, e-books and maps. KT hopes to have 124,000 NESPOT Swing users this year, growing to 3.6 million by 2005.
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