A study on the introduction of mobile number portability under consecutive timetables in Korea

Abstract

Korea has become a world’s promising land of CDMA technology. It launched CDMA2000-1x service in the first half of 2002. Korea recorded a 69 percent of mobile penetration rate with 33 million cellular subscribers in 48 million-population nation as of the end of September, 2003. A voice quality over mobile phone is of the world’s highest level, as the cellular coverage reaches the farthest hinterlands of hills and subways. In Korea, three mobile service providers SK Telecom, KTF and LGT are competing in the mobile service market with their respective market shares of 54.2 percent, 31.5 percent and 14.3 percent as of end-September 2003. The market underwent a consolidation of five providers into three following an intensive competition among five providers, as KTF acquired Hansol M.Com in September 2000 and SKT acquired Shinsegi Telecom in January 2003. Seven years have passed since the entry barrier was broken with new providers joining the market. But the market showed no sign of relaxing dominance by the largest provider, which runs counter to the MIC intent. Therefore, efforts are required to improve the market condition. The regulatory authorities has implemented policies such as the so-called imbalanced regulation against the biggest provider versus favoritism towards smaller providers under a dual goal of forging a fair competition and increasing consumer benefits. But these policies have not worked effectively as intended to turn the situation around. Korea plans to introduce the mobile number portability in January, 2003. Under the plan, Korea is going to place a six-month time interval among each of three providers in launching date of the mobile number portability. This is going to be the world unprecedented way of putting each provider six months apart in introducing the system: the biggest provider will be the first to let its subscribers switch to other provider without changing mobile number. Six months later, the second provider will be the ...