Advancing 4-G Mobile
Communication Era
By Lee Ki-tae, president of Samsung Electronics' Telecommunication Network Business

The ICT sector has witnessed a dazzlingly pace of technological development. Seeing that the 4-Generation mobile communication era is dawning into reality earlier than expected, you will sense it. Until last year, there were many people who had ambiguous or doubtful views about 4-G technologies. With the relevant technologies having been already completed, commercialization is likely to be made two or three years earlier than planned in 2010. It also predicts that the so-called ubiquitous era, based on 4-G technologies, will be advanced.
The trendsetter is Wibro, high-speed mobile Internet, whose system and terminal have been developed by Korea. Following Korea's first commercialization of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) in the world, the development of territorial mobile digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) technology, Wibro is an essential technology that will open a new chapter of mobile convergence by combining mobile communication and high-speed Internet. Wibro has been so far considered to be a 3.5-G one, an extension of 3-G technology, but the latest technology will likely serve as a bridge to launch a full-fledged 4-G technology, or as pre-4-G, and evolve into a foundation of 4-G technology.
In the ubiquitous era, high-speed Internet will play an important part, and any free access through wired or wireless channels must be made even on the move by car. Wibro, short for wireless broadband, realizes an open-type wireless high-speed Internet network, and its combination with the existing wired high-speed Internet network will enable the AII-IP network, the basic infrastructure for opening the ubiquitous era.
It is significant that Wibro realizes Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and "Smart Antenna,"having almost assured of becoming the basic 4-G technologies. They will allow two-way communication or Triple Play Service combining voice, text and image. IEEE's 802.16e Group on next-generation portable mobile Internet is most likely to adopt a standard centering on Wibro in consideration of its unlimited future applicable features.
Korea will be the first nation in the world to realize a portable mobile high-speed Internet technology by demonstrating an experimental Wibro service during APEC Korea 2005 slated for coming November in Busan. I hope that the event will be an occasion to materialize our vision on Wibro and show off our technology prowess in the ICT sector.
Now is the time when Korea, corresponding to the status as one of the global IT powerhouses, will have to come up with mega-trend products that will eventually take an upper hand globally and bring about abundant lives. It is evident that convergence of Wibro and biotechnology and nano-technology would bring about an unrivaled competitive edge. Further combination with LAN, mobile phone and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) will create a next-generation ICT paradigm aimed at realizing a vision "A Big World in a Palm."It is appropriate for the government and Corporate Korea to now collaborate for the success of Wibro so as to advance the ubiquitous era. If Wibro, paving the way for the ubiquitous era, complements High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), also wireless mobile communication, whose systems and terminal have been almost commercialized, Korea will make a new milestone as it did with the DMB technology, thus helping the globe build up a cheaper communication network and widen the digital horizon.

This column was carried on the Opinion Page of the July 18th edition of the Electronic Times - Ed.