40M Koreans Now Using Cell Phones

Recently, the number of cell phone users has reached the 40 million mark. This comes after 22 years of the introduction of the analogue cell phone service and 10 years after the start of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) service.

Major cell phone service companies such as SK Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom announced on November 26 that the number of people using cell phones topped 40 million as of November 24.

The exact number is 40,010,247. According to the National Statistical Office, 48.58 million people are estimated to be living in Korea by the end of this month. Taking that figure into consideration, 82.4 percent of them are using cellular phones. Compared to last year’s percentage of economically active people, which stands at 71.7 percent, the number of registered cell phone users is bigger. This means that almost everybody, except children under the age of 10 and the elderly over the age of 70, is using cell phone services.

The history of cell phone service in Korea started in 1984, when so-called car phones were introduced. This car phone was designed for cars. At that time, only 2,658 people were provided with the service. Also, the regions available for such service were limited to metropolitan areas such as Seoul, Anyang and Suwon in Gyeonggi Province. In 1991, Korea made nationwide cell phone service available. It was seven years after the first introduction of car phones.

In 1996, the number of cell phone users started to increase dramatically as digital CDMA service was introduced in Korea. As a result, the number of users, which stood at a mere 1.64 million in 1995, almost doubled to 3.13 million people within a year.

PCS service, which started in 1997, gave momentum to the number of cell phone users because the price for service started to drop because of the competition. People who registered for cell phone service exceeded 10 million in June 1998, and the figure doubled a year and two months later. In March 2002, the number passed 30 million.

Now, telecom companies are getting ready to serve their registered users better. Yoo Seok-oh, a managing director of KTF, says, “Many people will get new and better services such as High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA, next year. A new paradigm of high-speed data telecommunication using picture phones and cell phones will start next year.”