South Korea’s telecoms regulator the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) is reportedly mulling imposing additional penalties on the country’s largest cellco by subscribers, SK Telecom (SKT), amid claims that it is continuing to offer high handset subsidies. According to ZDNet, while the cellco has already been fined for such practices, and set to serve a ban on signing up new customers between 31 January 2013 and 21 February 2013, a report conducted by the KCC has claimed that SKT had continued to violate the rules regarding handset subsidies more than any other operator. In an investigation carried out between 25 December 2012 and 8 January, the regulator claimed that SKT had the highest violation rate in terms of the proportion of excessive subsidies for new customers.
Jeong Jong-ki, an official from the KCC’s customer policy bureau, is cited as saying in the report: ‘[The KCC] has been monitoring the market since announcing the suspension and confirmed that SK Telecom is continuing to violate the rules.’ Meanwhile, Yang Moon-seok, a member of the KCC’s standing committee, claimed that while fines and suspension from new sign-ups were ‘harsh penalties’, such measures may not be enough, claiming that the regulator may ‘need to penalise [the operators] further’.