South Korea was ranked second in the 2008 broadband leadership, conducted by the Saïd Business School at Oxford and the University of Oviedo in Spain, and sponsored by Cisco Systems, the telecommunications equipment maker. This year, however, South Korea retakes the top spot in an annual ranking of broadband quality, achieving a broadband penetration rate of 97 percent and quality score of 66 points, followed by Japan with 64 percent and 64 points, respectively.

The study takes into account the download and upload speeds of Internet connections, rather than simply comparing market penetration rates since the quality of connections has grown more important as online services such as IPTV(Internet Protocol television) are expected to become popular in the near future.

The reason why South Korea was ranked second in the 2008 broadband leadership is that the broadband quality wasn’t good compared with its highest broadband penetration rate in the world. However, with the government’s continuous efforts such as the ultra broadband convergence network(UBcN) plan the broadband quality has been significantly improved as you can see below.

Following is interview with Kim Faura, the CEO of Telefonica, Cataluna, by ET News. I translated the interview script in Korean into English. Please mind the possible errors in the course of re-translating.

Q. What is the purpose (reason) of your visit to Korea?

▲ We would like to enhance the competitiveness of our company. The technology in Korea has been upgrading. Telefonica will also develop its level of technology in the mobile field. We expect KOTRA would play a significant role to support global cooperation between Telefonica and Korean companies.

Q. Which particular areas of Korean IT are you interested in?

▲ It would be “HSDPA”. Telefonica is behind in area of “HSDPA”. I was very impressed by seeing Korean people using it. We have an intention to apply Korea’s mobile technology not only to the HSDPA area but also to other areas. It was interesting to know about ‘Optical Fiber’ technology of LG Nortel in spite that it is part of wireline communication technology. We’d like to learn the technology and provide it to Spain as well as other countries.

Q.There is a plan for disposal of Nortel’s stake in LG Nortel. Do you have an intention to acquire the stake?

▲ I only talked about technologies that NG Nortel has on this visit.

Q. I know that you’re also planning to visit SK C&C.
▲ We are having a meeting this afternoon. I’m interested in what they’ve got for us but not sure what would be suggested.

Q. Which companies in Korea are you hoping to cooperate with?

▲ We are looking for various companies. Because of this our CTO is along with me. We will decide what types of cooperation we suggest to each of them after ensuring whether price and technology is suitable to Spain market.

Q. What do you see the level of Korea’s mobile technology?

▲ Korea is always one of the best countries. Spain is behind with that and wants to improve. I’ve met with Pantech and there are 4 or 5 cell phones which are interesting to me. It could be evaluated as innovative products in Spain or England. We would negotiate a price with the marketing team.

Q. How much are you expecting to be the purchase amount of Korean brand cell phones?

▲ It was 400 million euro in previous year. It’s been rising since this August; we expect it to be 500 million euro for this year. Our role is to deliver products that customers want. People buy Korean brand cell phone because they want it. Consumers in Spain want to get Samsung or LG cell phone.

Q. How much would it be next year?

▲ I can’t tell exactly how much but with this regards, it would grow to be 6 million euro excluding Pantech. Pantech has to be run through test market.

Q. 7 million euro was put on a global R&D last year. Did Telefonica invest in Korea?

▲ I’m not sure. This investment is for world wide. Investment in Korea will be decided concerning this week meeting.

Q. Have you considered direct investment in Korea?

▲ We intended to 2 ~ 3 years ago but it didn’t work out. Korea market is conservative.

Q. What is Telefonica’s vision?

▲ We need various companies. We were an operator before but now we need to give out the value to our end customer through other application. We are showing steady growth now and looking for contents business.

Q. Is there any condition for Korea Company to cooperate with Telefonica?

▲ The answer is No. If there is a competitive product we will find a solution for the cooperation under any circumstances and of course the company has to be reliable.

Q. What about the global business plan?

▲ We acquired the part share of Telecommunication Company of Italy and China. We have a plan to cooperate with them for developing one mobile platform, which enables Samsung and LG benefit from it.

Yesterday (15 Sep. 2009), I got very excited from early morning. It was due to a TMT related conference held in Seoul, Korea. The conference was officially called ‘Telefonica Global Project Conference’, organized by KOTRA (Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency).

[Global Collaboration between Telefonica and KOTRA]

Telefonica (if you don’t know this company, just Google it!) in fact came to Korea to find potential business partners in Korea. The conference was structured mainly in two sessions: 1) Understanding of Telefonica (the company, its global business, and technology/service); 2) Private meetings between Telefonica and potential Korean partners. Since Veyond Partners is not mobile service provider, we attended the first session only.

Kim Faura, the CEO of Telefonica, Cataluna, gave presentation on ‘Where does Telefonica come from’, ‘Where Telefonica is now’, and ‘How Telefonica is evolving’ to give big picture of the company and its strategy. Followed by this, Dr. Gerard Mula, Area Manager for Internet and Multimedia Technologies at Telefonica I+D (R&D center). He focused more on ‘How they innovate their technology and services’, ‘How they collaborate with global partners’ and ‘What areas they want to collaborate with potential Korean partners’.

[Presentation by Kim Faura]

They seem to visit Korea because Korea’s mobile tech companies have so advanced technologies and services. They are basically highly flexible in terms of business partnership area but their hypothetical fields of interests include mobile 3D video, mobile contents download, User profiling services, mobile advertisements, mobile social network, u-Health, etc.

There were less than 100 attendants in the conference. But next conference in 10th November by KOTRA seemed even more interesting. The ambitious conference was called ‘Global Mobile Vision 2009’ (www.globalmobilevision.com) Next time, I expect to meet not only Telefonica but also many other global companies (113 companies) such as T-Mobile, Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Nokia, etc in one place.

I am also going to post the summary of interview with Kim Faura with one of Korea’s leading newspapers soon.