Korea's Mobile Carriers Are Evolving Backwards
As I’ve lived in the US for the last year or so, I feel qualified in comparing cell service between South Korea and the US, and describing how shit the former is.
No mixing numbers
Korea was pretty late to the eSIM game, but when we finally got eSIM, it came with a whole bunch of restrictions. The biggest restriction is that your phone lines get suspended if you happen to mix SIMs with different identities on a single handset.
Your mom’s phone stopped working, and you want to see if it’s a phone problem or a USIM problem so you put your mom’s USIM in your phone? Too bad – now both you and your mother’s cell service have been suspended, which means you have to go to the nearest carrier store to beg them to reactivate it.
(Note that this restriction only became an issue because we didn’t really have dual-SIM phones in Korea for a very long time, probably because the Korean carriers lobbied hard against it. But with the introduction of eSIM, mixing SIM cards in the manner described above became possible.)
Of course, the Korean carriers claim this is to prevent the proliferation of stolen burner phones, but we had that issue back when we had physical USIMs, so I’m not sure what effect this restriction will have in preventing such problems.
IMEI collection
To facilitate the above restriction, Korean carriers collect both IMEI values of your phone when you sign up for an eSIM. They use this information to verify that a given handset only has SIMs tied to one identity.
This is ridiculous. No other carrier requires you to submit both IMEI values just to activate an eSIM card. When I activated my eSIM in the US, Visible (an MVNO of Verizon) asked me for one of the IMEIs on my phone, and that was it.
Speaking of activating eSIMs…
Activating eSIMs in Korea sucks
Korean carriers charge you 2,750 won (about $2) every time you re-download your eSIM. In stark contrast, I can move my eSIM around with my US carrier Visible with zero restrictions. In fact, I can’t think of a single carrier around the world, except for Korea, that charges for an eSIM transfer.
The entire point of eSIM is that since it’s all digital, there’s no physical card to make. The cost of moving bits around on a server and beaming me that eSIM info should be negligible.
Now, apparently the Korean carriers are claiming the cost is due to royalties involved in implementing eSIM. But considering other carriers around the world don’t pass that on to their subscribers, and considering we’re already paying a whole lot of money just for cell service, I think they should stop being so freaking greedy and eat the cost.
Oh, and actually re-downloading the eSIM?
In the US, re-downloading an eSIM is just a couple of taps on the mobile app.
In Korea, you need to call their hotline during working hours and hope that the process works, or go to a physical carrier store. Kind of hard to do when you’re on the other side of the freaking globe, like me.
The arbitrary 4G/5G divide
In America (and many other parts of the world), there is no distinction between the different generations of cell service. If you bought a new 5G phone, pulled your SIM from your old 4G phone and put it in the new one, then you’d get 5G service, automatically.
In Korea, you have to sign up for a specific 4G or 5G plan when you sign up. Of course you have to pay more to get 5G service.
This creates a bit of a problem, where people are content with just using their 4G services, because 5G is marginally better than 4G due to the infrastructure just getting started. Then carriers don’t want to spend money on expanding the infrastructure, which leads to stagnation and 4G and 5G being used in tandem.
But in other countries, all users automatically get 5G service, so they have more reasons to expand and set up more 5G cell towers. This also allows them to deprecate old gear and start removing 3G and 4G services.
In the long term, focusing on maximizing profits by putting arbitrary distinctions on cell service generations will lead to Korea falling behind in terms of cell service quality, compared to other countries.
Speaking of quality going downhill, can I introduce a cell service feature that is nonexistent in Korea?
Wi-Fi calling (or lack thereof)
It’s quite ironic: there are tons and tons of Wi-Fi access points in South Korea, but if you were to try and call through them when you’re in an area with Wi-Fi coverage but no cell coverage, you’ll discover that you can’t.
I got bit by this once when I was traveling in the countryside and got to a place with zero cell service, but pretty decent Wi-Fi. I still couldn’t make any calls or send any texts until I walked closer toward an urban area.
Most first-world country cell carriers already implemented this feature ages ago, so I have no idea what would drive Korean carriers to not implement this, other than cutting corners.
Since we’re talking about costs, I’ll wrap up with…
The cost of unlimited
In the US, I pay $25 for unlimited calls, texts, and data, on 5G. Even data for tethering is free, no strings attached.
In Korea, I need to pay over 100,000 won (about $74) just to get close. And even if I pay 3 times as much, I still get data limits tethering.
If nothing changes, I fully expect this trend to continue. We will get less for more.