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Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success
An anonymous reader writes "What makes South Korea so special in the world of high-speed Internet access? How can the U.S. and other countries learn from it? What separates South Korea from the rest is a clear agenda and execution process by the government. They wanted to be THE broadband capital of the world so bad, they never swayed from that goal. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea was desperate for a savior. The government realized technology was going to restore the country's economic health so the entire country unified to push broadband penetration rates to the extreme."
http://urban.blogs.com/seoul/ Always found this blog interesting, seems the right time to pass it on. :0]
>I think that the fact that South Korea is smaller
>in size than the US gives it an advantage.
I don't think so. Canada is only one tenth the population of the US, and has a far lower per capita GDP than the US has (Canadian per capita GDP is the sama as Korea actually), yet Canada (and Korea) both still have far wider broadband deployments than the US.
It has just not been important for the US govt that this get done, and to the telcos either, that are always too shortsighted. So now other countries have leaped ahead.
There is no excuse for it really, rather than corporate and govt bungling. The US has by far the highest p/c GDP of any of these countries, and is certainly rich enough to pay for it if they wanted (heck, the money used in Iraq up to now would have paid for it a dozen times over...)
So its not about density, or 'too expensive'.. Just the people in the power to make change don't care to do anything about it...
The United States considers itself the centre of technological innovation
Yes, the USA considers itself the centre of technological innovation, but that doesn't mean it is.
Places like Japan, Northern Europe, and as this article discusses Korea, are ahead of the USA in many respects.
AC says: There's no ISP I know of charging for "international traffic," not in US or Korea.
Ok mediot... just because ISPs don't charge customers for international access doesn't mean they get it for free. They have to pay other ISPs to take their packets out of country. The price is rolled up into your final bill.
Any ISP's businessplan must include an estimate of what percentage of packets can be served on it's own network, which go to neighboring national ISPs, and which need longer-haul routes. Packets from a US user will, on average, need to make many more hops between different ISPs. (I bet Korean packets only need to switch ISPs once, at the master hub in Seoul)
For each of those hops, the ISP needs a payment agreement in place with each other.
As an international school that often has a 4-5% S. Korean population, I can attest to this. Last year was the last straw. It's bad enough trying to configure a Korean student's machine to join our domain, but CLEANING it?!
;)
Adaware and Spybot are wonderful tools but they don't do jack for Korean spyware. The problem here is, we use a proxy and some of that garbage sits inbetween the Winsock interface and the network - effectively trying to bypass the proxy server.
For instance, there was a girl complaining that she 'couldn't get on the Internet'. After some examination, I found that she had some sort of Winsock redirector installed. No virus checker, no spyware checker, NOTHING took care of it. After two hours I was able to dig it out, but it had three layers of protection - constantly trying to add itself back into the registry under aliased names... All of them Korean. FRUSTRATING!!!
Sadly, I ended up telling returning international students that we will no longer be able to support their machines (READ: allow them on the network). For a simple 15% population I was spending 45% of my time to keep these machines going.
I hated doing it, but thanks to inceased spyware and God knows what else, it's hard enough attempting to keep English-based machines clean, much less trying to troubleshoot a machine with a strange egg-based icon set and symbols I can't decipher.
And yes, it's true. They think our 3 Mbit connection is WAY slow...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
While not near the penetration of S.K., those areas of the US also have broadband in most areas. If you want it and live in a densly populated area you can get it.
Look at the population density of North Dakota. I know someone who lives in a township (36 square miles) with a population of 95, and the next township over has only 17. (thats 2 square miles per person and some left over!) They are the ones without a good broadband option. they also only get 1 TV station, and then only on a good night. I think there is a radio station, but I've never heard them listen to it so I can't be sure. Do you have any good ideas for getting them broadband? They'd buy it, but only if it was affordable.