BARCELONA, Spain ― SK Telecom president Ha Sung-min on Monday made clear his opposition to companies that gain profits from network use but refuse to share the cost of the growing traffic burden with network providers.

It was the first time that the head of the nation’s largest telecom operator had expressed his opinion openly on the widening disputes over network neutrality.
“The surging network traffic was one of the concerns raised by global telecom carriers during a board members’ meeting of the Global System for Mobile Association,” said Ha, who was visiting Barcelona to attend the Mobile World Congress.

Ha is a board member of GSMA, a global network of mobile operators and related companies that hosts the Barcelona fair every year.

About the recent comment made by Samsung Electronics’ mobile chief Shin Jong-kyun that technological development could help relieve network traffic, Ha responded: “It could be in part but not enough.”

“Now data use has reached a level that the telecom industry cannot handle. A new rule should be made to better manage limited resources and encourage companies to share the costs,” he said.

SK Telecom has set up a large-scale booth during the mobile industry’s largest annual gathering for three consecutive years. This year Hynix Semiconductor, its recently acquired chipmaker, joined the booth.

Ha said Hynix was actively seeking partnerships with makers of chipsets or cell phones, adding that there was a lot of room for synergy between the chip maker and SK Telecom.

Ha also said the fourth-generation Long Term Evolution service has been adopted in Korea faster than expected since last year, with the demand for voice-over-LTE growing among both industries and consumers.

“Even though details such as handsets and payment plans have yet to be decided, we are speeding up efforts to launch the service within the year,” he said.

By Lee Ji-yoon, Korea Herald correspondent
(jylee@heraldcorp.com)