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America's Broadband Dream Is Alive-- In Korea
An anonymous reader writes "America's Broadband Dream Is Alive in Korea thanks to government encouragement, according to the NY times (free reg, etc...). But profits are elusive." The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
I think this would be much harder to implement here in the US.. too much space, geographically, and an economy that's already in the dumps... it would be cool to see, but maybe wireless would be a more viable option (if it ever becomes legitimately secure, which it sort of inherently isn't, I guess)...
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
That would be "South Korea", not "Korea".
That's North Korea. This article talks about South Korea. There is extreme economic disparity between the two.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/05/business/worldbu siness/05BROA.html?ex=1052712000&en=5906ece0642a35 44&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
One well-placed North Korean nuke and South Korea's broadband capacity won't look quite as attractive to business.
..that Korea is about the size of new jersey. I assuming that south korea is half that.
..and is anyone wondering why despite America's huge landmass and population spread over it.. that this broadband dream hasn't happened here yet? :)
Then again with friendly fire as it is, the South might get it in the butt just as much as the north does :-)
Bye!
...the Free Market Fairy is coming very soon and will bestow upon our great nation unbridled weath and abundance. But first, you must believe!
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
United States lags well behind South Korea and Canada,
and has slipped below Japan.
I guess all those civil liberties are making them Canadians upitty.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Maybe I would have broadband available where I live if the US government were an 'encouraging' entity instead of bogged down in bureaucracy. Whatever happened to leadership? Looks to me as though it's moving overseas...
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
We're capitalists (or we're supposed to be anyway) and besides if the government took control of implementing broadband then how could some company (started in someones garage) monopolize the market?
S. Korea has. they have a government driven Capitolist system. the government tells each company what to make.
so the governement told the telco to make broadband available every where and the telco did.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Not only is USA more spread out, but Korea is full of high-density housing. I mean, Seoul looks like something out of a profitable Sim City, with entire clusters of high-density houses. And then theres the net cafes for LAN games for when the kiddies want to leave their broadband home connections and go outside.
... like in Japan, but with less bullshit bureaucracy. If anything, Id say Korea is fast becoming Japans technophile dream.
Koreas definitely at the forefront - subway has cell phone access, mainstream TV shows feature live gaming
Thanks to our lame free enterprise system, where one company (regardless of how many smaller units the FTC breaks it up into) owns all of the cable or phone line, broadband is just not affordable.
We've gone from ~$30/mo for 6Mb in the @Home days to nearly $50/mo for 1.5Mb thanks to ATT and now Comcast. In another 5 years, BB will be $100/mo for 768Kb. Gee, more money for less speed, I can't imagine why it's not taking off!
the profits are elusive! With the exception of the larger cities like Seoul, the small towns really couldn't give a crap about "Broadband"! Everyone has their own set of priorities and for the farming communities (70% of Korea!) farming is all they care about and want!
It's like trying to bring HDTV to Eskimos; sure it's great and beautiful, but what purpose does it serve? It's a luxury that isn't worthwhile for them at this point!
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though
And what about Canada? They're up there too with ~%50 penetration. You can't really claim that they're much less spread out than the US. I imagine that dense urban areas, where implementing broadband would be easiest, make up a similar percentage of population as well.
On top of that their rates are lower than those in the US (in Candian $'s nonetheless!).
.. is that the entire nation was dumped on the Internet at the same time. An entire nation of newbies. All the schools in South Korea got the same distro of Linux with open proxies running, and I'm not sure if there's a single working abuse emailbox in the whole country.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"thanks to government encouragement,"
We've tried the whole "government encouragement" bit to an extent, except our phone companies aren't interested in having their cake if they can't eat it as well.
I expect the Baby Bells to be using this as an excuse to lobby our Congress to loosen up the Telecommunications Act of 1996 a bit...
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
From what I gather, DSL and Cable is cheaper and more available in Canada than in the US. And we know that Canada is much more "spread out" than the US. So that's not the reason at all.
I don't understand why Americans are so against government intervention in this area. It's not so evil or communist to have the government subsidize, legislate or otherwise help create infrastructure. Nobody calls the US interstate highway system "communist" or "socialist" because the government built it. Besides, who paid for ARPANET in the first place? What ARPANET communist?
I expect to see a "Korea's network obsolete" story here by tomorrow morning... ;)
But seriously, how quickly are users going to clamor for more bandwidth? Sure, 9600 baud was great, you could send data uberfast, and that was all you needed. I remember my first 14.4K modem, where I could plug a phone line into it instead of having to place the handset on the reciever... Amazing it seemed. But now, modems seem like a joke.
Korea is much more socially techno than people in America. I mean, where else do you have local hangout places (bars, et al) outfitted with computers so that buddies can battle it out? Unless you are in the small minority of geeks who actually know how fast a T1 is, bandwidth is either slow or fast. In Korea, computers and technology are much more important socially, in both the high-class business world to the 3L33t G4M3M45T3RZ world. Here, if an executive or teen brandishes his or her new PDA, people "Oooh" and "Ahhh" and think, "I want one of those so people will think I'm rich." In Korea, people think, "I thought the X2Z56a revision of that PDA wasn't out yet..."
You get the idea. Koreans treasure their bandwidth more than Americans do, on average. When will they want more?
Last time I was in S. Korea (December, 2001) someone quoted me a statistic that one out of every two people (that includes everybody- babies, homeless guys, old people) have a hand phone. (cell phone for those US-centric.)
I was being made fun of by old people because my state-of-the-art US cell phone at the time was a "brick".
Obviously, broadband is just as widespread. My 80-year old grandmother doesen't even have a washing machine, but she has DSL, for crying out loud.
Off topic a little...
:-)
Broadband aside, one of the reasons Internet connectivity in England is so fast is that pretty much all of the ISP's are housed in 2 buildings - Telehouse City and Telehouse East. This is doable because England is so small (about the size of Florida). Therefore, if you connect to another UK site the chances are your interconnect is over a 100Mbit (or even faster) LAN connection.
Is it the same way in South Korea? If so local Internet must be blindingly fast!
I would love to see this happen on a Global Scale and it is getting close with peering points such as MAE East/West, Telehouse (New York, London, etc.), Amsterdam and Frankfurt to name but a few hosting servers with mirrors of major websites. TUCOWS being an excellent example. In a few years, bandwidth will cost next to nothing and hardware is already getting very cheap. All it takes when the prices go down is some smart routing and DNS.
Maybe I'm just dreaming...
The RoK needs to worry alot more about DPRK field artillery than can hit urban areas right now.
The big guns, like the 152mm tubes can hit Seoul while 10,000 DPRK artillery and mortar tubes can hit 75% of South Korea?s population.
Not to mention sabotage and the world's second largest Special Operations trained force.
From the site :
:)
1- South Korea : 57.4 %
2- Canada : 49.9 %
3- Japon : 25.6 %
4- USA : 22.8 %
Canada ratio is double than that of USA !
I guess that kind of make the argument "The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea" a bit overdue at the very least
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Im not joking, its DPRK "The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea" Every news source outside of the US refers to it as such (even our English speaking breatheren in Canada and Britan).
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
It is my understanding that, while Canada is a large country, that like 95% of the population lives w/ in like 100 miles of the US/Canada border. It would be more accurate to think of Canada as a very short but wide country, like a sideways Chile.
I thought I remember reading in one of my dusty history books that people who lived in the former Soviet Union had shitty consumer goods and infrastructure because the spent all their money on military endeavors. Correct me if I'm wrong.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
While this may be interesting, in a capitalist society such as the U.S., it is not the government's responsibility to provide Internet access to individuals. I am perfectly happy with my DSL as is, and i don't want them meddling in it. If I wanted socialism, I'd move to South Korea or Europe. But I don't.
...but I have ONE choice in cable, and last I checked, DSL wasn't being sold in my area by Bell- they don't offer DSL anywhere there's cablemodem access, because(gasp!) they don't want to compete. I think they may have started offering DSL now(they CO has been wired for DSL for many, many years), but the prices are absurd and there's a 96kbit upload cap. Yes, you read right, 96kbit! How am I supposed to upload cute photos to grandma, or "my files" they've always got some business-person-type harking about, for work, at 96kbit?
In lower/mid-westchester 2 years ago, I had 1.5mbit/768 for about $70/mo, and my choice of providers(I went with Speakeasy and paid a little more per month.) I was quite far from NYC, and Westchester doesn't have nearly the technology industry that most of eastern MA has.
Please help metamoderate.
In nearly all countries in Asia, broadband is very cheap. Here in Taiwan, it only costs $10/Month for cable modem service via an annual fee. To push the broadband rush, the government has mandated all dial-up services to be free. In Taiwan, dial-up isnearly free. The only thing you pay for is the by-minute phone charges that occur on every call here.
However, a lot of people used the free dial-up service. So, broadband ISPs had to push to get customers. They have done things like offering extremely cheap service and promising amazing speeds. This is not only limited to Taiwan, similar broadband pushes have occurred in China, Hong Kong, and even South Korea.
To comment on timothy's blurb and the article, although the US is well connected it does not have the push that Asian countries go for. The $32/month internet service is quite expensive in South Korea. Although the US is widespread, laws and regulations have also hindered the spread of broadband. For instance, there is no law in the US forcing cable systems to have competitors when it comes to broadband internet. There may be other examples, but I will leave that to Slashdotters to discuss.
One out of every two people in S. Korea has an antenna shaped brain tumor...
um... probly 50% of people in Korea (south) don't even know what the internet is. Just because you can point to a few people who have broadband who've never left their home district of Seoul, doesn't mean everyone is wired.
Yes, more people per capita have broadband in South Korea. But fewer people have computers. A whole lot of them use cyber-cafes for email and games and that's it.
America's Broadband Dream Is Alive-- In Korea
e a929
Try South Korea ONLY!!
This is what happens in North Korea: http://archive.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/nkor
"Starving North Koreans are turning to cannibalism and the government has started executing villagers selling human flesh"
Particularly discouraging is that the US doesn't even have a policy to get broadband into every home on the horizon while practically all other modern, democratized nations do. We're still waiting for the Free Market Fairy to come along and wave her magic wand.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
ok come on you've set us up for the punchline, don't keep us waiting!
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
totally off-topic, and has nothing to do with the fact that most of Asia is more connected and higher speed than the US.
when I can get 12mb to my house like in Tokyo, THEN i'll say the US is connected.
Once this and other rogue nations and ISPs behave in a responsible manner, perhaps they can rejoin the club. Now back to our regular programming :-) . . .
The conclusion: Canada is big, but it's got a few relatively small highly populated areas and a whole lot of very sparsely populated territory between. Thus, serving most of the people with broadband is a lot easier and cheaper than in the USA.
Here in Memphis cable is affordable. First started out on Road Runner's 6 month promotion, at $30 each month, My speed was about 580/186 kbps.
After that deal ended, I switched over to Earthlink branded Road Runner. The first 3 months are at $20, then it will go to $42 a month. My bandwidth is a blistering 2048 kbps for download (I'm not joking), and 385 kbps upload. For less money, I'm getting more bandwidth.
Yet, that American boy knows how to build a nation of compassion, into which tens of
thousands want to emigrate. Few, if any Americans, want to emigrate to Korea.
Don't kid yourself, most immigrants do so for economic reasons. To get closer to the
captilatist Mecca that the USA is.
Is your "health care" system an aspect of your so called "nation of compassion"?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
I didn't mean "even" South Korea, I meant "especially" South Korea. And, one of those links didn't make it. Needless to say, there are over 20 free dial-up services here in Taiwan. Most of them go through this one dial-up service center so they share the same phone number, bringing the actual service count down to around 8 or so. Also just speculating, but for that $32/month, that Korean man probably had 5 Mb/sec for both downstream and upstream or faster. :)
Did I miss something? Did the two Koreas repair their relationship and become one? Or have we used US Tax $dollars to wire up North Korea?
From the article, here is a list showing the broadband penetration as a percentage of Internet households:
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
keep in mind to check the facts:
S. Korea : 98,190 sq km
New Jersey : 20,295 sq km.
so by my math: S.Korea is roughly 5 times bigger than NJ, more like Indiana.
Oops.
It's what percentage of the population lives in urban areas. The ratio is probably pretty even in all the countries listed. Korea, Japan, etc. are more dense because of smaller land area but in the end even in the U.S. the majority of the people live in cities so you would expect the rate of DSL availablity to be similar.
Obviously the list shows this is not the case, so other factors are at work.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You say it as if America is the only country in the western world to take such an attitude to life. And while I certainly do not want to start a country vs country arguement, it's probably best to get less patriotic over something which is unrelated.
As for lack of social contact IRL... I've found my view of the world has expanded beyond what I knew IRL, learning different points of views from different people around the world. Ain't gonna found an unbiased unpatriotic opinion in the boy scouts.
Yeah, damn... The only thing this can be described as is Extreme Parody. However I fear it is not, hence my rebate:
" The American boy spends an extra 5 hours on volunteerism"
Hmmmm... nice sentiment.
"The Koreans laugh and snicker at how "stupid" that American boy is in high school"
Hmmmm... blatant flamebait. Certainly Koreans I know don't. Who here knows a Korean like that, opposed to supposing a Korean they've seen in the street thinks that? And what proportion of Koreans is that?
Perhaps American troops should stop raping underage Korean girls, running them over, abusing the public? Yes, the American army is a good idea. Pity about the rejects they get in the infantry. Still, they'll be the first to die, no worries then.
Yes, a compassionate nation is a good thing, agreed.
"One of them is kindness and compassion, which we actively foster"
Like killing 2000 civilians in the Iraqi war and not issueing any kind of appology or compensation. The media doctoring photographs of brutality to 'heroism'.
"Heck, we've got the Peace Corps"
Yeah, OK. The peace corps have never been employed to subvert socialist governments in Latin America have they?
"we note that more than 50% of Korean orphans in Korean orphanages are adopted by Westerners"
Who notes that? Who? Which survey? Well done anyone who does. But sadly they are far and few between.
Sad sad sad flamebaiting troll. Each and everyone of you articles.
But of course, most people actually know what was meant, even if it wasn't spelled out in grotesque and painful detail... :)
What is the feasibility of putting broadband down along power lines rights of way and using wireless for the last mile problem?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
These broadband topics always put me in a bad mood. I live in one of the capital cities of Australia (Adelaide) yet if I want broadband (ADSL is all thats supported in Adelaide) access I have to pay Tel$tra these prices.
For a sample: $76 AUD (about 48 USD currently) a month = 256/64 connection with a monthly download limit of 500 MB . Extra downloading charged. Per MB. I always knew that US broadband was heads above ours but now I find that the Koreans are so far ahead that we'd have to use a telescope to find them.
I get 2Mbps/512kbps for 29.90 a month with Free in Paris. No sign-up fee, modem provided at no cost.
Interestingly, those guys, who have run on free software for year (hence the name, Free), have developed their own set-top box, AKA Freebox, which is more than just an ADSL modem: it's got 100baseTX, USB1.1, 2x phone RJ-11, one SCART and has an IR remote control.
They plan on providing digital TV and phone service through ADSL soon. Service is unrestricted, unmetered, unfiltered, static IP through DHCP, though still a bit rough around the edge at times.
You mean the health care system responsible for 90% of all new medicines every year? Yes, thank you.
List all of the AIDS and Cancer treatments developed outside the U.S......
Exactly!!!!!
South Koreans are also avid gamers. They show competitions on TV for crying out loud. And of course to play these games competitively you gotta have broadband or go to one of these cybercafes. One could say these games are a killer app for broadband. Meanwhile, here in the US you've got people who think 56K is fast enough because all they do online is send email. Others can't get broadband because they live in the sticks or just aren't willing to pay for it. Lasty there's the group of holdouts who think the net is a big waste of time ... especially those durn games. What's my point ... well I'll bet TV didn't take off until entire families saw stuff like I Love Lucy that you nearly HAD to see every week in order to feel like you're part of modern society. A show or event that everybody felt obligated to participate in. In Korea it's games. Here in America we just have email. The average joe doesn't see any big benefit to broadband.
Why do people feel compelled to point out that NY Times requires a free registration? Just post the URL with the tag '&partner=GOOGLE' at the end of it and be done. It's not that hard, is it?
They could have pressured Silicon Valley Power and PG&E to open their utility fiber optic networks to provide Silicon Valley with cheap bandwidth. Presumably, they were too busy figuring out what parts of their companies to outsource to bother.
The new broadband services will be coming.
From someplace else with smarter business and governmental leaders. Maybe South Korea. Silicon Valley will rust away at the sidelines.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Capitalism is the most compassionate economic system there is.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
Korea is a small country, but the serious problem is that Korea is not blessed with natural resources; the soil is completely barren compared to that of America. Even China and Japan is more blessed in terms of agricultural resources. The only resource they can utilize is the 45 million people packed in the territory half size of Michigan.
That's why they have to focus on the IT industry. It's a matter of survival. Moreover, it does not require any material resources that must be imported from overseas in order to create additional values, unlike the commodities produced from factories. Actually, Korea's achievement in broadband connection is disappointing considering the fact that they still lag behind in other related industry such as software. The funny fact is that there are so many skillful programmers in South Korea but that there is actually no killer application in world-wide scale. It's like a superman with great strength but without any intelligence at all. It's a magical wonder that Korea somehow managed to build an Internet with Korean audience with such a meager support for the software developers. In Korea, bank tellers get more salary than software developers. Even CEOs of major Korean companies often refer to their develpers as "technicians", revealing their ignorance in business administration and strengthening their *authority* over developers.
For this reason, Korea's success in this broadband connection has a great deal of potential problems that must be solved in near future. America and other countries may have a lot to learn from the Korean case, but I don't think the lesson will be a great value to them. In order to name the Korean situation as a "success", it should be after Korea became_at least_ a major participant in the world-scale IT industry. So far, the closest one is only Samsung electronics with its quality Samsung memories. No Intel-like cpu manufacturer, no Microsoft-Sun-Ibm-like software companies, no Sony-Apple-like creative corporations, even no Redhat-like major Linux corporations in South Korea. I think their future is grim, in contrast to the seemingly great achievment as of now. The achivement must have been greater by now.
Did you see the comments above about the guy who took a US state-of-the-art mobile phone to South Korea and gave the South Koreans a chance to laugh at those primitive Americans by doing so?
As I said, you got your wish.
Tech Public Policy stuff
See title.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
We have uncapped wireless here in the Queen Charlotte Islands for $40 Canadian a month from a private, unsubsidized isp. There's no reason to not have it in the US... only excuses.
n/t
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
--we get a much longer growing season, but I really enjoy winter-no bugs! I DO miss ice fishing though, grew up in michigan. I don't miss 6 months or more winter, one month is nice enough, a few good snowfalls every winter.
Anyway, I got baby tomatoes already. Got quite a few small peaches and apples, etc.already, and most everything else is up and growing fine. Looks like our normal "wet" summer, we seem to alternate drought/floods. North Georgia. It's OK, have to see it is quite pretty here most of the time. Plus I get to "pass". I got them long hairs,and am an ex-yankee (reformed now) but so do a lot of the local bubbas, so I can blend in, and being able to speak "rural" as well I can get by.
Ya, storms, pretty nasty, just looking at drudge, few dozen souls have passed on since last night with the twisters. When I was a kid,second grade or so,I saw one on my way to the basement with my mom, it was exploding some houses up the street. You just do NOT forget scenes like that.
The neo-cons may mistakenly believe the pseudo-libertarian notion that everything should be a market, but any student of history and economics knows that a society is best served when public utilities are managed in the interest of the public as a whole. In case you didn't notice, sewage, gas, electricity, water, and roads are considered public utilities. What's so different about telecommunications?
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Now, list the names of all the people who could use AND afford such treatments...
Hate me!
Go back to Russia, you commie. I suppose you think the poor are entitled to housing because they are poor and I am supposed to pay for it because I am rich? Why in hell's name should I be forced to give up my hard earned cash so it can be "redistributed" to people who just don't feel like working.
Here in America we reward innovation, intellegence, and hard work with money. You Socialists seem to punish those who innovate by taxing them exorbitant amounts. Perhaps that's why the US innovates more than the rest of the world combined?
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
The majority of Canadians live close to the US border, but that doesn't mean that no such infrastructure has to be built in the vast North. The Inuit probably have more broadband than you people down south.
You want me to list the names of millions of people here?
Everyone in the US who chooses to spend $40/month on health insurance instead of cigarettes and beer can afford these treatments.
Funny you should mention Canada.
... prior to Baby Powell's mismanagement of the FCC (and the local telco monopolies), and prior to that agency's willful unwillingness to enforce federal laws mandating fair and equitable access of competitors to local monopoly last-mile wire, Spring offered an 8 Mbit download/1 MBit upload ADSL service which, for the two months I had it before SBC drove them out of the marketplace with Baby Powell's blessing, Downtown Chicago actually surpassed rural canada in available bandwidth.
With Timothy's typically unenlightened, American Apologist addendum to the original post, and I quote:
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
one would expect Canada, which is even larger than the US, less densly populated even in its populated areas, and much so in its rural areas, to have even less broadband availability than the United States. However, surprising as it is to many of my countrymen, broadband is both more widely availabe and less expensive in Canada, indeed, in rural Canada, than it is in downtown Chicago.
This wasn't always the case
No longer.
Although I live in the heart of the city, a mere 10 minute walk from the dense, commercial portion of the city commonly referred to as the "loop," I am unable to get affordable DSL at anything greater than 1 Mbit. This, in contrast to the very inexepensive, 2 Mbit and better offerings available to rural residents of Alberta.
The dichotomy between the United States and Korea (South) isn't one of geography, it is one far more closely related to the dichotomy between Korea (South) and Korea (North), i.e. the difference between a nation with a well managed telecommunications industry and one with a poorly managed telecommunications industry, and while America (The US) bears little resemblence to the deprivations of North Korea, we probably owe that more to a history of decent management which has only, since about the 1980s, become an ongoing condition of zero and even negative-sum gameplaying by our leaders, in contrast to North Korea's fifty odd year of starkly negative-sum policies.[1]
However, if those of us living here do not get off our butts and insist on good governance, for the good of the many and not just the few, we may find ourselves, in not so many generations at all, bearing a striking resemblence to the third world we so like to disparage. Indeed, arguably, in terms of health care and telecommunications, we already do. Let's hope the greed of the ruling class and their political pawns doesn't extend that to our home or, worse, our food supply.
[1]Negative-sum games are scenerios in which a player's strategy is to win in such a way that the overall wealth is decreased, but their sum total increases. Imagine starting out with three pies, throwing one in the face of your opponent, and then running off with the other two. Only two pies remain, but 2 pies are better for you than merely 1 1/2. Or imagine an intellectual property regime that impoverishes the culture of billions, but makes a few thousand people filthy rich, and a few million able to make ends-meet, if just barely.
Zero sum is where you compete for portions of a pool of wealth which neither grows nor shrinks. Assuming a fair outcome, you both end up with 1.5 pies. Assuming an unfair, but nevertheless non-destructive, zero-sum scenerio, the three pies remain in existence and are divvied up in some fashion favoring one party or the other.
Positive sum scenerios are of course the best, and in terms of physical goods (and limited supply), capitalism generally excels here (except in situations of monopolies, be they 'natural', such as roads and telephone wire, or through economic or political force, such as the East India Tea company in days of yore, or Microsoft today). In this scenerio a strategem is employed that results in the creation of additional pies, which may or may not be shared freel
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I mean it. Keep up the good work.
If I could handle the weather I'd move to Canada in a heartbeat.
It's overpriced and has at times been extremely unreliable.
-Of course, if you really want to be technical, there is no "South Korea" either.-
The parent I was replying to was stating just that fact. My whole point was to be technical and give the other proper name for the countries in question.
But thanks for the Canada bit, I guess I knew that, but it had never been made obvious to me.
But what do I know, im just a geography nerd looking for anonymous lesbian three-ways.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Except that all the little towns between all our big cities have broadband too. And they are way more spread out than the US is.
my options for internet here in the sticks of West Virginia... Satellite (too expensive) or dialup....
Seems like Belgium isn't mentioned.
Belgium has 20,2% of all households on broadband (all households, meaning that those without any form of internet are counted too)
source
Now since 36,4% of all households in Belgium have internet (tainted: 2001 statistics)
source
this would give us a 55% (probably less since the above percentage has risen meanwhile) broadband penetration into the internet households.
Is it just me, or did Belgium deserve an entry in this article?
(I do realise that Belgium is a small, high populated country, but still...)
Damn those Koreans... Ah nuts, I forgot that I am also Korean... Ma bad. Sorry Korean folks... I am seriously Korean so it's ok to say bad things about them just like Irish ppl make fun of themselves :)
buffering...
Oh yeah, the broadband dream is alive over here.
I live in Seoul. Here is my experience of the "broadband dream" in South Korea.
1) I have cable TV with the major provider here. I asked for cable Internet from the same company.
2) Eventually the tech came over to my house. He knocked on my door, and then headed up to landlords place.
3) There was lengthly discussion in Korean (I don't speak it) with lots of shouting, which is strange because Korean's in general do not shout.
4) I pretened to get on my phone and call someone, that always works around here, so they proceded with the install.
5) I thought they would run it through the same cable going into my house for my TV. Well that's not how things are done around here.
6) They run a cable from a metal hatch in the middle of the neighbors dive way, on to the street, along the curb on the main street, up the curb again and through some bushes beside my place, across a path, up the side of the building to my kitchen window.
7) They proceed to drill a hole through my window frame, run the cable down across my kitchen counters, and across my floor. Did I mention hammering the cable in while they go?
Well, I'm having quite a bit of down time. Not sure why. Could be the switches. Could also be when my neighbor drives over my cable on his drive way, or the neighbor kids poking and pulling at the thin black dragon demon on the road.
Oh, if you think this is only my experience. Think again. I can see cables running through everyones windows in my area, sometimes up four stories or more. My whole area is also only six years old. Most of my Canadain and American friends over here can't even get an internet connection to their house because of either just not having the service close enough, or their landlord saying no to the drilling and mess.
Part of the problem is that we _don't_ have a free market. The telephone and cable companies have historically had monopoly protection. No thanks to current rulings, phone companies no longer seem to have to give ISPs access to their networks at competitive rates. Cable doesn't look like they're going to have to share any time soon. (And I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to charge for use of their networks; just that they should be required to share for a fair price - think if you went to a car dealership, and they refused to sell you an economy car off the lot, because they make more if you buy the luxury model). Regulation and the free market go hand in hand.
But, there are a few other problems with the market in the United States. First, I don't know, but did we start installing cable & DSL equipment first? If we did, we probably got stuck with all the first generation hardware, probably slower and more expensive. That's the problem with being an early adopter (little incentive to upgrade old hardware).
Second, how much does it cost to send data around the network? Prices I generally see from, say, webserver hosting facilities are ridiculously expensive (eg. SBC's web page says $0.10/MB = $100 per gigabyte!). Obviously it doesn't cost this much to send data around the network, but from the amount that ISPs seem to whine that "people use too much bandwidth" something needs to change before we make fatter pipes to the end user.
This is in part probably due to the geographic size of the United States. If you make a simple assumption, that most network traffic stays within the country of origin, then the length of fiber that a packet needs is going to be proportional to the size of the country. The average "American" packet probably needs more network hardware (kilometers of fiber, repeaters, routers) than the average "Korean" packet.
Third, we probably have invented better legalese! "Terms of Service" are a bigger problem than bandwidth. At least I can find one monopoly out here to sell me a cable modem. But, good luck trying to get someone to sell you plain vanilla internet access (static IP, servers OK, no "this is for entertainment purposes only" junk). This would be a good spot for regulation - when you buy a phone line, you have a good expectation abou what you just bought. Reliable voice service, the right to connect any device with some mimimal FCC approval, the right to talk about anything you could talk about in person. The phone company doesn't try to override your ability to use an answering machine by claiming some "Terms of Service" baloney. We need a bit of regulation on ISPs to make a uniform expectation of a "TCP/IP Dialtone" - no blocked ports (unless you ask for it), no bandwidth games, just the minimum needed to prevent abuse (other laws already outlaw intentional damage to other systems or networks, and some may follow for spam).
Eh, anyway, my point is, regulation != socialism. It's what defines the shape of the free market.
Check out this guy's story about Korean broadband might.
www.1stopkorea.com
Click on www.1stopkorea.com/korean-internet.htm
or click on the Link
'E-Korea' - Myth versus Reality on the above page.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
I've lived/worked here in South Korea for the last 4 years. It took me two years to get ADSL, and one year later they bumped me to VDSL for free. Saying the penisula is saturated with connectivity is an understatement.
We're being told the country will have 802.11b end-to-end by the end of summer. The airport has had it for the last year. The old and new govts. push for this type of infrastructure. New apt. buildings for the last two years come jacked for broadband. If you have a need for speed, this is the place...
A huge percentage of Canada's population lives in the four largest cities. You have to go to more like 10 cities in the US to get a large percentage of the population, and even then it's far less. Sure, Canada's bigger, but nobody lives in most of it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is one area I'm glad the US is behind in. There's even billboard ads starting to appear in Europe which try 2 sell u stuff in that terrible style of SMS messaging that makes AOL-speak look positively literary.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's very likely that any spam labeled as "from AOL" has forged headers. In the past few years they've actually done a very admiral job drastically cutting the amount of spam originating from their servers (and even tracking down and suing spammers originating on other servers).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Every news source outside of the US refers to it as such (even our English speaking breatheren in Canada and Britan).
The BBC doesn't.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Did you read the caption on that chart? All it's saying is that 22.8% of US households WITH INTERNET ACCESS have broadband access. In other words, the US' already wide-spread Internet availability throughout the country (thanks, AOL) simply means that broadband wasn't so important to the millions of people who just check their email once a day and don't want to pay extra.
But for some odd reason _only_ in the headlines.
. st m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2644613
An odd stance to make, but I guess they have to play both sides of the fence for readership.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
They have high speed access because the bells do not write the rules. THe government of South Korea does.
According to another slashdot story %98 of all American fibers are dark. Thats right %98! Who laid these cables? The bells. See a patern?
They wont switch these fibers on untill the whole market is deregulated. In states where it already is only high paying customers with T1's have access to the fiber backbones. High speed isp's are going under now since they are charging more per month per user then there own service. Not to mention dsl is more expensive and the speed is capped.
Less supply= more demand. Its totally artifical on purpose.
Japan has 100mps all over Tokyo. They laugh at us Americans for our current situation.
We need to write our representatives about this. Imagine if the water or sewer companies did this and forced 1 out of 4 americans to install outhouses? Or image a $450 a month water bill?
Our government can only legally contract with the baby bells and they already have a monopoly. Its the governments public utility lines yet they act like its theirs and they refuse to serve them untill they have more deregulation. Its blackmail.
http://saveie6.com/
Funny, we have power to damned near everywhere. Water to damned near everywhere. Roads to damned near everywhere.
Sewers to damned near everywhere.
What, we can't have broadband because the US is too 'spread out'?
Hi, I call bullshit on that.
(Funny, we have cable TV damned near everywhere now, too.)
From 1stopkorea.com World Leader in Broadband? Now how about broadband? With more people, as a percentage, using broadband Internet service in Korea than any other country in the world you would expect that to be pretty painless. Right? Well . . . The whole time I've been writing this article I've been trying to log onto my Hotmail account to check my e-mail. I've also been trying to log into Yahoo to do some updates on a website I work for. It's been nearly two hours now and still no luck. I've called my service provider, Korea Telecom (Korea's national phone company), for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks but all I got was the same old story. "Our customers are having problems accessing some foreign sites right now. We know about the problem but have no idea when it will be fixed. Is there any chance you can just use Korean sites until then?" "Well, I signed up for Internet service, not some kind of Korea-only service. I have work I need to get done. Why do you keep charging me full-price when you're not giving me full-service?" "We're sorry. We know our customers have been having some problems with foreign sites. Do you think you could e-mail us the exact URL and some other information about the sites you're having trouble with?" "Uh, hello!??! It's Hotmail, my e-mail provider, that I'm having the problem with. How do you suggest I e-mail you?" "Right, could you hold please?" If I only had a buck for every time I've had that conversation recently . . . Three trips out by a technician ("whoa, your computer uses English Windows. Could you translate this for me?"), endless phone calls and hours spent on the phone with tech 'support' have all been a waste of time. All I've gotten for my trouble is the same old story about problems connecting to some foreign sites. About how they're, "aware of the problem but don't know when it will be fixed." Always left unsaid, "keep paying your bill or we'll cut the whole thing off and take away your phone service . . ."
But hey, at least it's only Yahoo and Hotmail. It's not like anyone uses those sites . . .
I switched to KT's 'Megapass' service last year after using another provider called Thrunet (a.k.a. 'DownNet') for a couple of years. I finally gave up on Thrunet because it was down so much as to be nearly useless. I figured Korea Telecom, as Korea's national phone provider, would offer a lot more reliability.
At first KT was fine. It was maybe a little slower than Thrunet but at least it was usually up and running. That is, until the past couple of months. Now I'm to the point where the sites I need to use are down at least as much as Thrunet ever was. Which means trouble for me trying to get my job done.
For whatever reason KT, the national phone company and largest Internet service provider in Korea, can't seem to get its servers straight with those of Hotmail, Yahoo and several other foreign sites. Each time I call they insist they are working on the problem. Each time I call they also insist they have no idea when they'll get it fixed. Each time I call . . .
Perhaps it's time to try Korea's other broadband provider, Hanaro . . .
The next time you go through Inchon Airport and see one of those ads praising 'e-Korea', or hear some Korean proudly patting themselves on the back for being such a telecom utopia, please remember that underneath all the hype there can be a lot of problems. Those of you living here and thinking of buying one of these services please be aware of what can go wrong and the hassles involved, especially for non-Korean speakers. For those of you thinking of investing in one of these companies, good luck. Thrunet's recent bankruptcy filing and SK's huge accounting problems should mean you're in for an interesting time!
These have been my experiences. I'm sure others have something to add, pro or con. Please head to the feedback page and let me know. I'll post the replies in a future update.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
Most of the msn, yahoo, and aol addresses you see are spoofed.
The article you linked to gives me the headline "N Korea quits nuclear treaty: Text." The only usage of DPRK is in the body of the article, which is a translation of an official North Korean press release (and thus obviously uses their preferred terminology).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Consider a country like Japan, or Korea, or Taiwan, where the population is dense, and the language is specific to that region or country.
A normal (J/K/T) kid would hardly use English, there's simply no reason to try to get something from a US website. Ie, most of the broadband traffic stays WITHIN the country. That is, you can practically lay lots and lots of cable and treat the whole country as a very large LAN network.
In Australia (where I'm at), most of the web searches ends up at at America. You surf the net and ends up in America, and the data has to be carried over fiber optic cables across the pacific ocean. That costs $$$.
It makes sense now doesn't it. That broadband prices will always be cheaper in certain parts of the world.
I expect it would be a similar case in UK. Or may be Europe.
I also suspect that the model they used is not applicable to the rest of the world, and the kiwis may have sorted out a better solution citylink/wellington
jliu
The article left out an even more important "digital divide": that between the poor and the rich. Seriously, that is something that has far greater "digital availablity" importance (not to mention socioeconomic) than age does.
It's becoming even more important, too. With the Internet and computers in general becoming more important to life, that the poor have less access to computers is going to hold them back more and more as time goes by.
... one big open proxy, with large sections of its netblock blackholed all over the world, and its entire netblock blackholed by some?! Yikes! I had no idea!
Every time I see the (NYT yadda) disclaimer, I wish there was a "click here if you're NOT going to follow this link" link.
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
Is that why only 99% of US has electricity, water, phones etc.? If this was a rush to the first phone network I could understand this statement, but with BB its only a question of changing equipment at both ends. OK I accept there are limits to the availability of BB to distantly connected phones, but if you see the space images of the US at night it looks like you are quite well concentrated already.
Funny that you mention Luxembourg in a thread essentially about broadband services. Yeah, our economy is good, but don't kid you, it isn't as good as 2 years ago.
Anyways, about broadband in Luxembourg:
- DSL: One company: P&T Luxembourg (majorly state owned), but multiple ISP's. DSL started appearing about 2 years ago and we (my family) were one of the first to jump on it. Having over 100Euro/month phonecalls on our ISDN line for internet made the decision not hard at all. However it costs as much as 90Euro/month for a measily 256kbps downstream and 64kbps upstream. Variation in price can only be archieved by switching ISP, and that's in the range of max 5 to 10 euro per month. For all fairness, in the total 90Euro/month is your phone subscription included.
-
Cable: I don't have internet over cable, but what I know is that we have two cable companies. One that controls the North and one that controls the South (yeah, I know, very strange to talk about north and sound if the country is only 87km accross). I've started to see ads for the cable-internet service, for about the last 2 months. Just looking at the website covering the north of the country ( Eltrona ) Oh, jolly, only 256kbps/64kbps too! And it also goes over the P&T! 62Euro/month...
Compared to the neighbouring countries, Luxembourg only gets the low end of the "broadband". (Heck I was happy for 5 years with ISDN). The only reason to go ADSL for me is that I can run my own server. That rocks, and that's something that's not possible in the neighbouring countries (post lower than 1024 are usually blocked), unless you pay for a business DSL.Noteworthy details: ports under 1024 are not blocked and running NAT is encouraged. Linux not officially supported, but a howto and drivers are provided. Also the 64kbps upstream limit doesn't seem to be enforced.
Apart from the expense of living in Luxembourg, it is indeed a great country!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I live in the middle of Denver CO, no more than a few miles from AT&T Broadband headquaters (now Comcast). I have been waiting over three years, and I still can't get broadband.
They are doing a misserable job, in my opinion.
Getting back to the original point, read "No No Need to Be Jealous of Korea: the American Way" and "Adoption Rate by Americans of Koreans: Some Stats". That the Koreans supposedly surpass us Americans in broadband usage is not an indication of how Koreans are better than us. We often label the Koreans and Chinese as smarter and harder working than the Americans. However, we need to look at the whole picture. We Americans have more kindness and compassion than the Koreans. A concrete, impossible-to-refute example is the fact that more than 50% of Korean orphans are adopted by Westerners. Most of them are Americans. Koreans simply do not care about orphans. The cruelty in Korean society is really amazing.
The only possible justification for concern about the broadband issue in the USA is that the Canadians are ahead of us Americans in broadband usage. Comparing Canadians and Americans is fair. Both group are, after all, Westerners. Canadians have the same degree of kindness and compassion that Americans have.
Hey, the US is great, but health insurance is EXPENSIVE here. I pay more than $100/mo, plus whatever my employer pays (a lot).
If you try to buy as an individual, it will be $2-300/mo easily. Plus copayments, deductibles etc
To the moderator who rated this a troll:
Obviously, you don't live in Asia. Maybe you've never even been a tourist here.
I have lived in Asia for nine years, married here, and have a family here. You could say that I'm a bit familiar with it.
The only thing wrong with that post is the blanket statement "Koreans simply don't care about orphans." Some do, but yeah, most probably don't. It's the same in Japan, where I lived for several years, and in the country where I live now (not Korea, but my wife's country). Most of the orphans who get adopted here are adopted by North Americans and Europeans. The rest stay in orphanages and many then wind up on the street, as beggars or criminals. I have seen with my own eyes, and heard from my wife, who knows because it is her culture, that Asian cultures by and large don't care much at all about orphans, beggars, the homeless, what have you. This is not flamebait, this is not a troll, this is just the fact of the matter as observed by someone who has been in Asia for a long time and has an Asian wife and children.
I've met some people coming here to adopt babies from orphanages, and they were wonderful, compassionate people. The government here, to its credit, does not stand in the way of these adoptions. Their adoptive parents can provide for these children in a way that orphanages, whether private or government-run, could ever do. Everyone wins when there is an adoption.
Before you mod someone a troll, please stop and consider whether or not what they are saying might be true, even if it's an unpleasant truth. If you don't know for a fact that it's not, please save your mod points for something that is obviously a troll or flamebait, not something that just might disagree with your world view or your own prejudices.
Happily, your moderation is on my meta-mod list for today. Unfair.
Pay tuition.
Now watch this drive.
Soujanyam is a word in Malayalam that, in this context, means Free [as in beer].
:-)
Swatantryam means Free [as in freedom] - but I'm sure you guessed that
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]