South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) has named incumbent Korea Telecom (KT), SK Telecom (SKT) and Hanaro Telecom as licensees to provide the 2.3GHz mobile broadband service called Wireless Broadband (WiBro) starting next year. The licences are due to be awarded next month. Experts believe WiBro could be the world's first major non-fixed WiMAX service implementation.

WiBro developed out of a domestic Korean project called Hpi, but now uses the IEEE 802.16e mobile variant of IEEE 802.16 WiMAX as its technology underpinning. It will initially provide access speeds of around 1Mbits/s, although there are bandwidth/ground speed trade-offs.

In addition to a licence fee, the WiBro contestants were scored by the MIC on the basis of their capabilities and service plans, with KT judged the winner. This apparently entitles the incumbent to select the specific bandwidth for WiBro service in the 2.3GHz range. A KT press statement said that its trials would kick-off in early 2006, with a commercial offering in April of that year, initially confined to Seoul. Late last year Hanaro and SKT agreed a WiBro infrastructure sharing deal.

WiMAX delayed
WiBro developments are taking place against concerns that the service could damage the prospects of 3G and Wi-Fi, and also upset the WiMAX international standards apple cart.

Meanwhile, the commercialisation of WiMAX itself seems to have suffered a set-back, with interoperability and equipment certification delayed for six months. An expectation had been that certified equipment would be available in the first half of this year. However, a 24 January statement from the WiMAX Forum both selected Cetecom Spain as its official certification laboratory, and announced a certification roadmap that marked July 2005 for the launch of the WiMAX Forum Certified programme. "Based on what we are hearing from our member companies, we believe service provider lab trials could begin in the third quarter of 2005, followed by commercial trials in the fourth quarter. We are optimistic that networks could be commercially deployed by the first quarter of 2006", said WiMAX Forum president Ron Resnick.

"2005 was thought to be the year of the WiMAX launch. Unfortunately, it will now mostly be the year of pre-WiMAX", comments Vincent Poulbere, senior consultant with Ovum. "Vendors will continue to sell pre-standard products to the few operators having already made a decision to deploy early, but operators waiting for standardised equipment will have to wait, and this will slow the market as a whole".
John Williamson