SKT under probe for way it lured LTE subscribers

Korea’s antitrust watchdog said yesterday it is investigating whether SK Telecom, the country’s top mobile carrier, violated a fair trade rule in a bid to woo more subscribers for smartphones running on the high-speed long-term evolution (LTE) network.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) sent its officials to SK Telecom last week to look into whether the mobile carrier set sales quotas of LTE smartphones for dealerships and threatened to cut their commissions if they could not meet the quotas.

Speculation has been rising that some dealerships held sales promotions by offering giveaways to increase the number of customers for SK Telecom’s LTE service.

“Recently, the FTC conducted a field probe into our company, but details are not known,” said an official at SK Telecom.

SK Telecom and its two local rivals, KT and LG U+, are ramping up their efforts to increase their shares of the growing LTE market.

SK Telecom and smallest player LG U+ launched the LTE service last July. No. 2 carrier KT belatedly entered the market in January as its move to shut down its 2G service, aimed at using the same bandwidth for its LTE service, hit a snag due to a court injunction.

Yonhap