South Korea charges for VOIP apps

Which VOIP reports.

Popular smartphone VOIP apps are reportedly cutting into South Korean telecoms firms' phone and text profits. Korean VOIP app, KakaoTalk, has become incredibly popular and has been downloaded by 36 million users in Korea and an additional nine million internationally.

Other mobile VOIP apps, like Skype, Google Voice and Fring, are also reportedly creating profit loss for major Korean telcos. With nearly half of South Korea's 50 million cellphone owners owning a smartphone, the reported profit losses have forced the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) to take a drastic measure.

The KCC has reportedly allowed three mobile operators - SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ - to charge extra for VOIP applications or choose to have them blocked altogether. SK Telecom and KT have offered customers' unlimited data plans at the moment, which allows users to freely download apps on their networks. On the other hand, LG U+ had already been blocking OTT (over-the-top) programs. Mobile operators are now bumping up the prices for data usage to counter the excessive VOIP app downloads. New pricings for rates are currently unknown, but the move has many questioning whether South Korea is violating Net Neutrality Rules.

With widespread use of these mobile applications adding data traffic and cutting into their text and voice profits, Korean operators have decided to raise prices for data usage, PCWorld writes.

"This will set a precedent for coming apps such as FaceTime, where SKT and KT already said they will apply the same pricing policy as with local apps, and this can clash with global players like Apple and Google," said Jiho Park, an activist with the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice.