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.

So, how important is bandwidth?

[Otter]

In the last paragraph, she kind of hints at what I was wondering for the last couple of pages:

She makes a big deal about the country's great bandwidth. But it seems like the big selling point involves real-world interaction -- playing games and hooking up in baangs, playing games and hooking up with people in other baangs. As she describes it, it's the social scene that's gelled around computer clusters that's important. (Sort of like pre-Internet CS clusters, except with much more attractive people.)

So, maybe providing bandwidth to the home is a dead end and it's developing cybercafes that's the key to a computer-centric culture?

(I've really got to visit Korea one of these days. I've changed planes in Kimpo plenty of times but never went outside. The biggest impression the country made on me was when I was watching a "Good Morning America" type show and the Katie Couric-ish host modeled the season's new thong bikinis. That was an adrenaline shot at 7 am, after a 12 hour flight.)

I Spent a Few Weeks in Seoul...

[vergil]

in the summer of '99, after flying Korean Air in from Jakarta. I showed up at a surprisingly sanitary $10-night youth hostel w/ no knowledge of the Korean language or culture (even though I'm 1/2 Korean).

After wandering around the city, I found a well-stocked Internet cafe that sold decent coffee and fairly decent cigarettes (Mild Sevens). The per-hour price wasn't bad, and it wasn't exactly difficult to master the Korean language keyboards. This particular cafe was classy, boasting a waxed wood floor and decorative plants. The drop-down Windows "run" menus of its 3-4 PCs were full of Ivy League servers, vestiges of touring American bluebloods.

Unfortunately, this particular cafe shuttered relatively early in the evening. Later in the night (when I wasn't occupied w/ meetings), I'd frequent an entirely different sort of Internet cafe accessible through a alleyway door and a staircase. This dim, windowless cafe was crammed wall-to-wall with high end PCs -- almost all manned by a stooped Korean teens mesmerized by StarCraft. For some reason, the beefy proprietor always waved away my cash, never accepting any of my proferred payment.

I haven't thought about Korean Internet cafes (or posted to slashdot) for some time, until encountering this article. Good to be back, and props to the trollaxor crew.

Arcade Revival in USA

[Vegan Pagan]

This article describes something that could happen in USA: A revival of arcades based on broadband.

One of the major appeals of arcades was that they let you play on technology more powerful than anything at home, with your friends, for as little as 25 cents. They steadily lost that advantage in the 1990s until they got to today's point where home games are MORE powerful, and arcades games cost 50c to $1 per play.

But what if they got that advantage back? What if arcades were based on broadband? I've noticed that in USA broadband is far more likely to be set up in large buildings and institutions than in homes. And when it does become popular in homes, the standard connection for large organizations might jump ahead again.

I'd like to see broadband arcades where you could play with people in the same room and people hundreds of miles away at the same time! And of course it would allow for voice chat, and maybe videophoning as well. The arcade owner would only have to install hardware and software once: The cabinet/cocpit itself would auto-update software forever after. And it should cost have a reasonable cost, the way arcades used to.

Would you go?

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