South Korea’s telecom giants surprise 7 million users with unlimited, universal internet — net access declared a 'basic telecommunications right,' 400 Kbps data after monthly plans run out

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Thursday that SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus — the country’s three major carriers — will provide more than seven million mobile subscribers with unmetered 400 Kbps data once their monthly allowances run out. First floated as part of a broader package of consumer-protection measures being assembled in parallel with its response to spiking memory and PC component prices, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon announced the program as one of many new obligations imposed on the three carriers in response to a sequence of security failures over the past year, calling unlimited, universal access one of the “basic telecommunications rights” that operators are expected to fund themselves.

400 Kbps might not sound like much, especially given that 5G can reach peak speeds in excess of 1 Gbps and standard-definition video streaming requires speeds of around 5 Mbps as a baseline, but it’s more than enough for very rudimentary activities like messaging and VoIP audio, or two-factor authentication.

It’s worth noting that the fallback to 400 Kbps only applies once a customer burns through their paid monthly cap, replacing the hard cutoff or overage charges that previously kicked in on affected plans.

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Alongside the obligation to provide unmetered 400 Kbps access, the three operators have committed to increasing data and calling allowances for seniors, upgrading Wi-Fi services on public transport, and introducing 5G plans priced at $13.50 or below. Bae also pushed the carriers to direct more capital toward network buildout for AI workloads.

"Having gone through last year's hacking incidents, the weight of the telecom companies' responsibilities and roles has become even clearer," Bae said in a press release, emphasizing, “We have now reached a point where we must move beyond pledges not to repeat past mistakes and respond with renewal and contribution at a level of complete transformation that the public can tangibly feel." He went on to say that it’s important for the government to contribute to people’s livelihoods, including by guaranteeing what he called “basic telecommunications rights” for all citizens.

Each of the three network operators has been hit by a significant security incident in recent months. SK Telecom suffered a large-scale subscriber data leak, whereas KT was found to have deliberately pushed malware to roughly 600,000 of its own subscribers who were using a third-party BitTorrent-based file-sharing service, resulting in missing files and disabled PCs.

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