Friday, 03 September 2010
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| Korea’s broadband breakthrough? |
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| Friday, 10 August 2007 | |
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Long heralded as being in the forefront of the home broadband revolution, it now seems the Koreans may have been cheating.
Wow! The world has watched awestruck as Korea tops the broadband charts. It has replicated that success in mobile broadband, too. Now it looks as though this is one big con, if reports are to be believed. The scam was exposed when unwitting broadband ‘subscribers’ faced negative credit ratings due to their unsolicited broadband deals to which they were linked. One such customer, according to Korean paper Dong-A IIbo, had spent eight years in Australia while his domestic broadband bill mounted. Dong-A IIbo also reports that according to a spokesman working for the Conflict Settlement Division of the Korean Consumer Agency, “88.32% of households are hooked up with high speed Internet. So the market is saturated, which forced competing service providers to engage in excessive competition, which in turn, led to the wrong practice.” Dong-A IIbo states that “The police investigation has found that KT and Hanaro Telecom, who take up to 70% of the market, stole 7.3 million pieces of personal information from their subscribers.” One Korean consumer group is planning a class action lawsuit on the ground of identity theft while Dong-A IIbo quotes Jang Eun-gyeong of Korea Consumer Agency as saying, “Of all identity theft, those cases related to telecom companies accounted for 64%. I think that is because telecom companies depend on telemarketing to attract subscribers.” These are companies who will doubtless become household names in the days, weeks, months and years to come. Jim Chalmers |
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