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The Ministry of Information and Communication will allow Wibro (Wide Broad Internet service to start by June next year, taking into consideration the situation of the three designated operators and looking ahead to the arrival of portable Internet service.
The decision was made in the ministry's 81st meeting for the deliberation of information and communication policies after opinions from experts and service operators KT, SK Telecom and Hanaro Telecom.
Failure to meet the June 2006 deadline will require prior approval from the information and communication minister to delay the launch of the service.
Participants in the panel meeting also finalized basic guidelines on the introduction of mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) to the country. Its introduction will be timed to occur three years after the launch of Wibro, when the number of subscribers passes the 5 million mark. Mobile network operators (MNO) are required to provide 30 percent of their capacity to MVNOs.
An MVNO is a mobile service operator that does not own its licensed spectrum and usually does not have the infrastructure to provide mobile services to its customers, i.e., it lacks a network on which its voice and data traffic is carried. Instead, MVNOs have business arrangements with traditional mobile operators and buy minutes from them to sell to their own customers.
The essential points of the guidelines, which were created to counter the leakage of clients' information by internal staff, include keeping the number of workers with access to the information to a minimum and restrictions on the informational items that staff can look into in the individual information treatment system.
Apart from the communication service providers, hotels, airlines, cram schools, large discount stores and department stores, where individual information is handled, will be covered by the guidelines.