[The Editors' Verdict]In The Era Of 2 Million Won AI Phones...The "Cut Phone Bills" Frame Must Be Broken

A world where we carry cutting-edge AI assistants in our pockets

"Cutting phone bills in half."

This slogan shows up every election season. Jeon Hyunhee, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party of Korea who has announced her bid for Seoul mayor, unveiled a plan to establish a "Seoul-style fourth mobile carrier" led by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, pledging to offer Seoul citizens ultra-low-cost mobile plans at half price or less. In South Korea, where household telecom bills are regarded as a living expense that must be reduced, there is hardly anyone who dislikes the idea of lower phone charges.

But SK Telecom, KT, LG Uplus and other telecom companies, which have faced pressure to cut rates every election season due to the long-standing perception that household telecom bills are a main driver of inflation, likely see things differently. Among the telecom executives this reporter has met, not a single one said that Korea's telecom charges are particularly high. There is logic behind their sense of unfairness.

Because Korea’s billing structure bundles handset installment payments together with service charges, any increase in smartphone prices is immediately reflected as a sharp rise in the "monthly phone bill" that consumers actually feel. On top of this, many users choose to bundle subscription fees for online video services (OTT) such as Netflix and YouTube or music streaming services into their telecom plans in order to receive discount benefits. Whenever content subscription prices go up, a phenomenon dubbed "streamflation," these higher costs are passed straight through to telecom bills, further increasing consumers’ perceived burden of phone charges.

Even under these circumstances, household telecom spending decreased last year for the first time in four years since 2021. Telecom operators that suffered hacking incidents pulled out drastic rate-cut measures to restore consumer trust, and this overlapped with the diversification of mid- to low-priced 5G plans and the expansion of the budget-phone (MVNO) market. In fact, the household telecom expenditure statistics that the government uses as a basis when pressuring for rate cuts do reflect these developments, but the phone bills consumers actually feel have not gone down. This is why, every election season, telecom charges so reliably become an easy target for politicians.

On February 25 (local time), Samsung Electronics President Roh Tae-moon took to the global stage to unveil the third-generation artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone series, the "Galaxy S26," expressing his determination to make AI not a privilege for the few, but a basic infrastructure that everyone uses every day. The company will have made efforts to keep handset prices at a competitive level, but with exchange rates and component costs rising in tandem, the top-spec Ultra 512GB model has, for the first time, crossed the 2 million won mark. Telecom operators, meanwhile, now have to invest more aggressively in infrastructure such as AI data centers, stable networks, and security to match the AI-usage environment. This foreshadows that the burden of household telecom costs will inevitably grow further.

It is worth asking how long we should keep insisting that "lower prices are always right" when looking at phone bills that now also effectively include the cost of using AI services. The more politicians cling to the "cut phone bills" frame to win votes in election season, the more they sap telecom companies’ motivation to invest in AI infrastructure. Rather than obsessing over forcibly shaving down the numbers printed on phone statements, it is time to shift our focus toward encouraging and monitoring whether the money we pay is making AI infrastructure stronger and creating an environment where we can fully enjoy innovative AI experiences. We cannot keep constraining the price we pay to carry a state-of-the-art AI assistant worth 2 million won in our pockets and enjoy vast global content within the outdated cost-of-living reduction frame of the old feature-phone era.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.