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Jeju to be transformed into Wi-Fi heavenBy June, most of the island will have wireless Internet coverage via a Wibro to Wi-Fi system
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¡ã Jeju’s netizens, tourists and businesses will benefit from this test bed project. Photo courtesy KT

Universal and nearly free-of-charge Wi-Fi is the de facto standard of wireless Internet connectivity for laptop computers, smart phones, portable game consoles and other mobile devices. However, the problem with Wi-Fi is that it is by design nomadic — you have to stop and sniff out a Wi-Fi signal broadcast from hotspots in your radius to be connected.

KT thinks that they have a solution to this dilemma. During a press conference on April 26 the company unveiled their plan to, by the end of this June, blanket Jeju Olle trails and other tourism hotspots with Wi-Fi signals. The technology KT employed to realize this promise is “Egg,” the new Wibro mini receptor/broadcaster designed to accompany and wirelessly tether to a laptop computer, iPhone, iPad or any mobile device with a built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Egg converts super-fast Wibro broadband Internet into Wi-Fi which then beams the signal within about a 10-meter radius, turning any Egg holder into a walking Wi-Fi philanthropist — if he or she chooses to use it without a login password.

The company believes it can cover some 70 percent of Olle trails and 95 percent of tourism hotspots on the island, including Mt. Halla, with Wi-Fi signals by expanding the number of Wibro/Wi-Fi routers to 1,500 from the current total of 900.

KT will also install Eggs on thousands of buses and taxis on the island and provide at no or low cost Eggs to tourists when they hire a car from KT Kumho Rent-a-car, KT’s rental car service arm. If you drive along Jeju’s roadways with an Egg connected to your rental car’s cigarette lighter jack, your car turns into a mobile Wi-Fi broadcaster.

Egg is the brainchild of Lee Chan Jin, a Korean venture entrepreneur who developed the famed homegrown word processor, Hangul. Lee first proposed the idea on his blog and Interbro partnered with KT to turn Lee’s idea into reality.

Wibro is the service brand of KT’s mobile WiMax that promises up to 50 Mbps of seamless mobile broadband Internet connectivity for up to 120 km per hour of high speed cruising. Currently available in Seoul and other metropolitan areas, the further expansion of the network is under way.

Turning signals from mobile wireless data points into Wi-Fi is not new. Apple’s iPhone supports a “Personal Hotspot” function in its latest iteration of its iOS (mobile operating system) by turning the phone’s 3G signal into Wi-Fi. In early 2010, chief information officer of Vail, Arizona district turned the district’s school buses into moving Internet classrooms by simply having installed $200 Wi-Fi routers on buses that came with a $60 a month Internet service contract.

Those routers are based on 3G network, however, which limits the number of gadgets that can surf the Web simultaneously with sufficient speed.

Seeing as the KT’s Wibro Wi-Fi router to be deployed in Jeju will rely on a 4G network instead, download and upload speeds on mobile devices will be theoretically much faster, while at the same time handling more devices with fewer instances of network glitches.

If this project is completed as promised, “Jeju will turn into a world-class mobile wonderland,” as Lee Suk Chae, Chairman of KT said at the April 26 press conference jointly held with the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province.

One of the reasons KT rings Olle trails and tourism hotspots of the island with Wibro/Wi-Fi network is to beta test the feasibility of Wibro technology before mass deploying it on the mainland. KT has struggled recently to popularize the Wibro technology before Long Term Evolution, the competing 4G protocol developed by European telcos, takes over the global market.

Jeju, as an island of half a million residents perennially crowded with tourists hungry for local information will work as an ideal proving ground for KT to fine-tune the Wibro network and come up with various creative applications of the technology.

In fact that is exactly the reason why Seoul built the nation’s first Smart Grid test bed on the island.
¨Ï Jeju Weekly 2009 (http://www.jejuweekly.com)
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