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Korea World Leader in Broadband/Technology at Home
bozoman42 writes "67% of Korean Internet users are connected to broadband, some at 32Mbps! In fact, according to the Guardian Article, Korea is leading in nearly all walks of a modern high tech life. But there may be downsides. (Especially as covered here last week.)"
I realize you're only using Mexico as an example, but I assure you that with a population of about 100 million in Mexico, way more than 100,000 people have Internet access. Telmex has been very successful in selling dial-up access and has TONS of customers. DSL and cable are slowly but surely making their way. But on top of that you find small Internet cafes all over the place. These are very popular among people who can't afford the service at home, or who need access to services like scanning, color printing, CD burning, etc.
Uhh ... no. For the mathematically challenged, if an average household equals 2 persons, then 67% of the persons have the access, not 134% as you seem to be indicating. Of course, the percentage may change if there is a clear correlation between household size and migration to broadband, but it does not depend on household size as such.
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I live and work in Seoul and while its true that most people seem to have broadband at home it doesn't seem like they use it all that much. Its also incredibly affordable, very fast and extremely reliable.
With that said, Internet Cafes (PC Bangs) are a huge business here. They are literally everywhere. Its very difficult not to walk in a busy area and not see multiple PC bangs. So while all these people have internet at home, they still go out to the Internet Cafe to play games and spend extra money when they could easily do so at home.
I'm sitting in a PC Bang now, it has about 40 stations and half of them are in use. Mostly men in their early to late twenties. Most of them are playing Starcraft: Broodwar or one of numerous Diablo II clones. The handful of women in here are playing cards or using chat software. I will play Warcraft myself shortly.
Anyhow, my point is that all these homes are wired yet people still flock to these cafes unnecessarily. I mean, in the afternoons these places are filled with middle and high-school kids and then with adults all through the night. Most are open 24 hours.
So 67% of Korean homes may be wired, but I'd say an even greater percentage of the population are internet users, I don't know a single korean who doesn't have an e-mail address or an IM id.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthl ights2_dmsp_big.jpg
If you think the Koreas are anything alike, look at that picture to see what communism does to a country. The divide almost looks too perfect.
--Joey
For those who are interested and not overtly offended by the source of the information, the CIA Fact Book for South Korea is available.
If you read the article this points to, some broadband connections are 8mbs not 32mbs, and they hope to have 20mbs connections out by 2005.
What you're saying has been true so far, but probably won't stay that way. There are already nationwide ISPs like Congent willing to offer 100Meg ethernet for about a thousand a month and this isn't DSL, it's real ethernet and it's the same speed up and downstream. It's true the existing players have done just that --played the American consumer for a sucker. But it will change and the most likely candidate for that change is wireless mesh networks. Seeing as how Taiwan is gearing up to push down prices on wireless hardware this should be happening in the next year or two.
Of course until then, this story is a sad testiment to the lies perpetuated by the scandalous telecoms players in the US. It's too bad the American people are too complacent to elect leaders that represent their interests. Here I refer, among other things, to the recent commerce department attempts to force the FCC to limit all 802.11 products to indoor use. That is a scandal that goes right to the Bush administration. Give that guy enough rope and he'll hang us all.
Alot of Europe has very old infrastructure, far more so than the US, think about it, the US is basically European expats + some other continents. The US on the whole does NOT have a long history compared to a great deal of the world, + it has a huge land mass for building new infrastructure, the US can afford to build new while keeping the old, places like the UK which is basically the size of Florida -have- to reuse old buildings as we can not afford to demolish all/rebuild and dont have the space for simply building all new extra. Also although countries in Europe etc were more involved in getting hit by Wars the rebuilding was done 50 years ago and it was not a total desimation of citys thus requireing total city rebuild.
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Telia also is privatized and has responsibilities to its shareholders.
The reason it exists cheap broadband in Sweden is that an entrepreneur startad a company called Bredbandsbolaget (The broadband company) and started to connect people with 10Mbit/s broadband.
Others followed suit...
This message was brought to you by a broadband user in Väasterås, Sweden.
Just saying it like it are.
Yes, blackhole all of Korea (North and South). That cut a bunch of spam out of *my* mail servers...
Although the technology mentioned in this article is still far from the reach of most western countries, Japan already has it all.
High-speed internet access has been common for many years. 10 megabit cable is now common for home users. 100 megabit is also available.
NTT Introduced FOMA 3G mobile services way back in early 2001.
HDTV has been available for at least 4 years. I first saw an HDTV broadcast in 1998.