Last year, North Korea saw an apparent mobile phone boom among its populace at the same time as the secretive state permitted foreign workers and tourists to access the unrestricted web via 3G. Even locals can subscribe to the 3G service, though they’re limited to just domestic calls and SMS, effectively barred from the internet. All that resulted in North Korea’s sole 3G mobile telco, KoryoLink, doubling its 3G user-base from February 2012 to April 2013 – surging from one to two million subscribers.
Now that KoryoLink has finally revealed new numbers, we see that the surge has turned into a slump. From April 2013 to the newest available data for June 2014, KoryoLink’s 3G subs plodded from two million to just 2.4 million, according to North Korea Tech.
It’s hard to discern what has caused this slowdown. Perhaps the telco – which is a joint venture between Egyptian company Orascom and the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC) – has reached saturation point among the local populace who can afford both the connection and a phone. Or maybe KoryoLink is aggressively de-activating the 3G accounts of tourists who have left the country so as to ensure that web-connected SIM cards with spare credit don’t fall into the hands of locals.
Both factors – and others besides – could be occurring at the same time. As ever with North Korea, a lack of information out of the country makes for a murky picture of what’s really going on right now.
North Korea has a population of 24.76 million, says the World Bank’s newest data for 2012.
Here’s a chart showing the slowdown, using all the publicly available numbers direct from KoryoLink:
Late last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited what looked like a local factory producing a homegrown, Android-based smartphone called the Arirang (pictured top). But earlier this year it became evident that the phone was a Chinese device that was simply being exported to North Korea and then repackaged in the nation.
(Source: North Korea Tech)
