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hen the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic hit Korea in 2015, leaving 38 people dead and 16,693 others quarantined, KT floated a novel idea. The company wanted to trace the migration and path of virus carriers using GPS information from smartphones and navigations. Given the seriousness of the epidemic, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) permitted KT to utilize personal telecom data with which the service provider developed a system of preventing the spread of the epidemic disease and provided it to health authorities. 

KT, seeing the success of the system, decided to expand the big data quarantine network designed to cope with epidemics. On July 8 at the 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, the prevention of the spread of epidemics was added to the G20 agenda. The move came about two years after the outbreak of the MERS epidemic.

KT Executive Vice President Yoon Jong-jin said, “KT has made a feat: a project KT has so far implemented is selected as one of the agenda of the G20 Summit.” 

The episode is a watershed event in Korean diplomatic history, he said. 

KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu said in an interview at the KT research center in Woomyeon, Seocho-gu, Seoul, on July 8, “KT’s project has got a boost as the G20 Summit picked the strengthening of the preventing the spread of epidemics diseases as one of its agendas.” The project which involved the requirement of permission to use personal information needs cooperation among countries, he said. 

KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu made a proposal to prevent the spread of epidemic diseases using big data to the government of each country and global telecom service providers for the first time, drawing global reception. At the G20 Multi-Stakeholder Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, on April 6, KT Chairman Hwang said, “We’re cooperating with health authorities of about 10 countries in the preventing of epidemics using big data of smartphones.”

He made the remarks while attending the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit 2016 in New York last June. He floated the proposal, saying that analyzing overseas roaming information by smartphone users could lead investigators to the routes of epidemics. 

Starting with collaboration in Korea, China and Japan, KT joined forces with about 10 countries, including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Kenya. 

Showing a keen interest in the project are German and French governments grappling with an inflow of refuges from the Middle East as well as the World Health Organization (WHO).

KT Chairman Hwang was invited to the G20 Multi-Stakeholder Conference by the German government, the chair country of the event. He delivered a keynote at the conference, titled “Digiitalization: Policies for a Digital Future.” Hwang introduced the proposal on the preventing the spread of epidemics, saying that companies and governments can solve diverse issues facing the world by sharing the revenues of technology development through collaboration. 

KT developed a technology to trace and predict routes of spreading avian influenza that incurred about 200 billion won in losses in 2014 by comprehensively analyzing telecom service providers’ big data on location and roaming information. 

Hwang floated the idea to prevent the spread of epidemics among countries by making the most of KT’s own technology. “Epidemic threats are borderless as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was shown in 2015,” said Hwang, adding that cooperation among nations is essential to protect people’s health and wealth.

Last November, KT supplied a system of tracing epidemic diseases to the Korean Center for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC). This past April, SK Telecom and LG U+ also began to offer a similar service. 

However, collaboration among only three telecom service providers is not insufficient. Gathering telecom data of foreign visitors who subscribe with foreign telecom companies or using USIM purchased abroad is not easy. That’s because Korean telecom service providers do not share roaming data with their foreign counterparts. The project requires deals to be signed on sharing telecom data with foreign telecom service providers to analyze big data, said Chairman Hwang, adding that KT is in negotiations to share data with such countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia where epidemics break out frequently. 

In May, KT signed a deal with the Kenyan telecom service provider Safaricom. KT plans to ink a similar agreement with telecom service providers in the United Arab Emirates, Rwanda, and Cambodia in the near future.