(Reuters) Canada's Nortel Networks Corp said on Tuesday that its UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) equipment, based on an emerging European standard, was successfully used to make a voice call at a test site of KT-ICOM, the high-speed services arm of Korea Telecom Corp, the nation's state-run mobile and fixed-line company.
UMTS networks promise consumers data-rich services including location-based marketing, multimedia messaging, game playing and shopping, but have been slow to be put in service in Europe as networks wrestle with high entry fees, brought about by billion-dollar spectrum auctions.
KT-ICOM plans to have a limited UMTS network running by the end of May 2002, to coincide with one of the world's best-watched sporting events, which will be co-hosted by Japan.
The so-called third-generation (3G) network would put Korea on par with Japan, where NTT DoCoMo Inc has deployed a 3G network on limited devices, and in a limited coverage area to a small base of subscribers.
Nortel said Tuesday's trial is a first because it was achieved using a combination of its technology and Mercury Corp.'s home-location register equipment, which allows a mobile network to identify its customers.
"UMTS is a very complex wideband technology. It's one thing to have it work on its own, but much more difficult to have it work with another vendor's equipment," said Pascal Debon, Nortel's wireless networks president.
Nortel said it was the first company to achieve a voice call on a UMTS network with Vodafone in Spain, although the call employed Nortel equipment only, rather than a combination of equipment from several manufacturers.
Philip Marshall, a senior analyst at telecoms consultant Yankee Group, said Korea Telecom would "effectively be running two concurrent networks", while still remaining a showcase for 1XRTT mobile phone technology, a technology that increases the amount of voice traffic that can flow over a network.
Korea Telecom's test with Nortel's UMTS technology follows an auction in South Korea that gave network operators the ability to deploy phones that can send and receive large data files, Marshall said. Analysts caution that demonstrating a voice call on a UMTS network, and fully deploying a working network, are two very different things.
"It's one thing to complete an interoperability trial. It's another thing to roll out a network," Marshall said.
Soccer fans could be watching video clips of winning goals at the 2002 World Cup in South Korea on their mobile phones if Tuesday's test of a high-speed wireless system allows development of a fully operational network.
