Net-Nexus Seoul

An anonymous reader writes: "Wired has a story in their new issue about Seoul, Korea and how it is The Bandwidth Capital of the World It is really interesting how popular the internet and cybercafes are as a social medium there. They also have a huge following of online game players, with over 70% of broadband users playing online. For me, the best quote about the business opportunities that have sprung up is '(We) wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.'"

Comments

American media companies are scared of interaction

[Edmund Blackadder]

they want to keep the condition where they talk and the others listen.

I think the reason is that american media is the largest creator of content in the world, and they are affraid of losing that.

So they try to keep hirarchical distribution networks.

A Korean cable network would probably not care what is going trough their cables, as long as people are paying.

In the us timewarner has a shitload of tv channels, movies, etc to push trough their cables, so they do care.

Also in the us, while almost every building is cable ready, there are only a few cable companies that are monopolies and provide pretty mediocre internet service.

the difference

[alizard]

As luck would have it, urban apartment dwellers have a lot of broadband capacity right under their noses, courtesy of Kepco, the public power utility, which developed a network of fiber-optic cables for its own use years ago. In 1996, South Korea allowed Kepco to lease the unused 90 percent of its capacity, giving upstart providers a cheap, instant last-mile solution. Sharp competition with Korea Telecom, which the government forced to open its network in the early '90s, has driven broadband prices down to the world's lowest levels. All-you-can-eat service is available for as little as $25 a month.

This is the most important part of the article, how they did it.

This has been done in the USA in a few places. A few lucky people have cheap fiber optic to the curb thanks to their local/regional municipal power companies. Their prices are comparable to South Korea's. This isn't happening here because in most states, the cable and telcos have bought legislatures to prevent this from providing their current customers with superior competition.

In the past, companies located next to cheap resources, mainly power and raw materials. In the future, companies will be looking for cheap broadband data access. South Korea will be one of these places.

The cities and rural areas with public power who have sense enough to leverage this into broadband public data access will be the hypergrowth areas in the future.

That growth will come at the expense of the areas whose people allow themselves to be governed by tards whose law-making capability is at the disposal of the highest bidder.

"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith

Re:cheers to seoul

[Provolo]

What appeals the most is the fact that most of the people dont have pcs at home.

Not really...Pc-rooms aren't popular simply because of the fact that people don't have PCs at home-many people do, and in many, many cases I've seen people go out and play at pc-rooms rather than just playing at home-despite their p4 PCs and DSL broadband connection.

Its not the lack of PCs, or services, or anything that makes pc-rooms addictive-its the culture.
I mean, aside from geeks, who has two net-connected computers in their home? One thing alot of people should understand, is that not too many people go to pc-rooms alone-its a social place.
A pc-baang doesn't replace the computers Koreans have at home- it complements 'em.

broadband in seoul...

[wuchang]

I just got back from Seoul. The thing about Korea is that it is mostly mountanous and has a sparse amount of land for living on. Since land is so valuable, there are really NO suburbs in Korea. Most people live in high-density urban areas inside cookie-cutter 15-30 story apartment complexes. Getting broadband to the masses is EASY over there since the masses are piled into a small number of densely populated areas.

On a semi-related note, one of the things that impressed me was that Korean companies are providing more interesting services to their customers. I went to one of the many high-tech Internet cafes run jointly with a cell phone company (i believe it was naver.com). Anyway, you buy cell phone service and it gets you in for free at all their Internet cafes. Besides having a load of PCs there, the one I went to had gaming-specific LANs, DDR video games, and even a private recording studio that let you do karaoke in a room with video cameras. At the end of the session, it even spit out a CD-R with a video recording of your session.

The other thing I found funny....You can rent cell phones in Korea right when you land. This is typical because there are very few wired public phones in Korea these days as everyone has a cell phone.