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Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the LPB dept.

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."

2 of 420 comments (clear)

  1. Blog on broadband in Korea by inkdesign · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://urban.blogs.com/seoul/ Always found this blog interesting, seems the right time to pass it on. :0]

  2. Re:A couple of factors are important here... by takochan · · Score: 4, Informative

    >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...