Slashdot Mirror
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."
A 100Mbps fiber optic pipe, to be precise, and at my home in shitty Moses Lake, WA, no less. Our county is laying it all over the place. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody did this?
in infected/rooted/wormed client pcs with lots of bandwidth.
great.
ostiguy saw some 3000+ intrusion detection system alerts from skorea over the past 36 hours
Why is it the fault of "American Capitalism" that your girlfriend has a dialup line? Because somebody hasn't given her broadband for free? I consider myself liberal, but really, isn't it going a bit far to expect your government to buy you your damn broadband connection?
Due to its large output of spam and its place as a relay station for cracker attacks, Korea is finding that it is in an intranet of its own. Non-responsiveness from (or non-existance of) admins and abuse desks in Korea is legendary. Thank you for korea.blackholes.us.
Yoghurt
Not odd for South Korea to succeed on a goal it aims. But it's more than that. Some times a "goal" of south korean can be translated to obsession.
It is no more than a year than discovery channel (or was it n.g chan? anyways) has done that show about the industrial revolution of south korea. It was discussing the obsession that country had to keep up with Japan and eventually it succeeded. The odd thing that obsession had come to that extreme that some workers were willing to give their lives for their country's economic wealth.
They had that south korean director of contruction for a ship building company that said "That day the ship was going to deport, I had with me a sword. It was in case something went wrong. I'd perform harakiri".
1. that nearly one-fourth of the RoK population lives in one metropolitan area?
... Don't have time to finish this post... think about Korea Telecom... government runned telco...
;)
2. that all telco equipment was most likely installed well after 1953, whereas the US infrastructure is surely much older?
DSL rules in the RoK. No doubt about it. Although as I was leaving in March 2003, wireless was catching on.
I for one miss my 6Mb/1Mb connection for about $35/month (no contract so it was more pricey).
Also, it was interesting explaining to the techs that I needed to swap my internal (pci) ADSL modem for an external one so I could use linux. The techs had never seen linux, so I invited one over to show them. Maybe they were just blown away by a caucasian speaking their language fluently....
The high penetration rate of broadband into south korean homes is definitely a economic advantage and productivity enhancer. But I disagree with the argument that government must do more to help the penetration of broadband into homes. Government must do less - they need to get out of the way and regulate less so the market forces can be unleashed. The american broadband penetration is considerable less mainly because there is so much government involvement and regulation at every level from national to local. The south korean government did the companies that wanted to build and enable broadband a favor by streamlining their regulations and reducing the hurdles.
that if a government decides to focus very hard on a particular goal there's a real possibility of their becoming dominant in that area. See also: US's determination to build the A-bomb in WWII, JFK's determination to win the space race, etc. and the effects that these had on related science/technology industries in the US at the time. The South Koreans decided that modernizing their telecommunications infrastructure was necessary to revitalize their economy, pursued the goal, and can now watch television over their internet connections.
Thats because they don't have Comcast/Cablevision/TimeWarner controlling it, trying to cap bandwidth and milk every penny it can out of its users. I STFA (scanned..TFA), did it mention what this exceptional service costs over there? They talked about what the government put out to make this infastructure happen.. but what does Joe Blow have to pay to get it? LOL Their "so-so" connection in APARTMENTS are 8 times faster than the best we have...
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I have to disagree with you in this matter. I probably come from a different background (mideuropean country), but I always had the impression that a high rivalry for market creates a great opportunity for the customer. Think what could you do in a country that has the monopoly for all telecommunications...
It would be a truly daunting and very expensive task to retro-fit the US with South Korean-like broadbrand. Especially with all the bureaucracy in telecommunications. The point is we should look to them and try to learn from their experiences and mistakes.
I think the biggest problems with trying to get broadband to the entire USA are:
1. You have competing interests with the telco's and the cable companies.
2. The sheer geography of the USA mitigates against wired broadband in rural areas.
#2 is especially daunting, given the good number of US citizens that still live in rural areas.
Here in the USA, universal broadband will probably arrive with WiMax and its related mobile version that can operate on a moving vehicle up to 155 mph (250 km/h). Essentially an extension of Wi-Fi, WiMax can support thousands of users per antenna, and the transfer speeds can be up to 54 megabits/second! (Though I think for capacity reasons, they'll probably cap it in real world use at around 10 mbps). The biggest advantage for WiMax is that it's vastly cheaper to put up antennas than to put up wired connections to every household and business, essentially eliminating the so-called last mile connection problem for broadband Internet access even in rural and mountainous areas.
It's very likely that WiMax antennas will use the same towers now used for cellphone antennas, so infrastructure costs may not be as steep as some people think.
Depends on how important communication is to the government- after all, they gave us the Pony Express, and later the US Postal Service, for pretty durn cheap.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It was an equally daunting task to provide universal phone system coverage to those people in Montana and the mountains of Washington State in the mid-20th century.
That's true. But once construction was complete the telcos essentially had a license to print money. They could easily sustain the expenditure of installing in remote areas becasue they could make so much damn money off teh system as a whole. Not to mention universal service charges.
Right now the fear is that they will build the network and then be forced to co-locate, provide facilities for competitors. This will eat away at their profits - and make it less likely that they will spend the money...
Yes, because Canada is smaller which is what the original poster SAID. You forget Canadians are all huddled together in the lower regions (I guess so they can snuggle up to the USA. They just love us there, you know). Like, 97% of Canada is barren wasteland inhabited only by mastadons and saber tooth rabbits. I saw it on Ren & Stimpy so I know it's true.
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.
No, because the other country's have less to do to modernize. Why is this so hard to accept over Byzantine corpo-governmental flim flam?
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...)
Or a simple lack of market demand, which has been shown in poll after poll. But, hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good ideo-rant.
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...
Well, no, it *is* about density and size, and about consumers not really giving a crap about it.
--- Ban humanity.
That could be a second big factor between US and Asian broadband. One of the most important statistics in assessing the potential profitability of a cable type business (phone, video, internet, even a power company) is homes per mile of cable. Your costs of deploying and maintaining a mile of cable are pretty fixed, say annual costs are in the $500/mo range. If your "content" (phone network, cable channels, ISP costs, or powerplant costs) are 80% of final consumer price your money is made on bringing your portion of revenues above your cable costs. If one area (say South Korea or a US city) has a density of 1000 homes per mile (lots of apartments and stuff). That will be far more profitable than Farmer Jones and Farmer Smith who live 1/2 mile from each other (say 10 homes per mile). The only way it's profitable to provide "piped" services to these places is through subsidies (the Universal service fund, franchise agreements, etc). I'd be surprised if more that 75% of the US population was in an area that was profitable to serve without subsidies. One of the more unique things about the US is that we have a ton of space per person. While this had been a huge boon from about 1700 to 1970, it is a drawback so in the new world of networks.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I'm staying at an apartment here in Seoul. Applied for broadband Tuesday afternoon after I arrived - the apartment wasn't wired for cable.
Guy rocks up with some cable, a cablemodem and a drill Wednesday morning.
Installation: Ran a cable from the roof of the apartment down to the window. Cable just flops onto the floor (he used the drill for some cable clamps in the wall).
Setup: Plug the cable modem into my laptop. DHCP on. Thats it. No login software, no caps. no smtp server, no home page. Just 2.5mbps download and 1.5mbps upload (in a test to the states that I did, during evening time).
Price: We chose no contract because we're only here a month, so we had to pay installation. 44,000W for installation, 27000W for one month.
Thats like $60USD for one month of broadband bliss (remember, including connection & installation).
While I'm at it - their TV stations here (KBS, MBC) offer live streaming of their TV channels PLUS video on demand of just about all programs they air. Who needs a TIVO here! (you've got to have at least 100kbps connection to enjoy it).
Alas you dont get very far if you dont speak Korean.
That's an interesting point.
FWIW, I have seen it. I grew up on a farm (15 miles to the nearest small town, 60 to the nearest place you might consider a city), and since moving away, I've lived in a small city of 200k (where I went to college), another moderately sized city of 600k (where I did an internship 2 summers), and now I live in a small town of 12k (Not my first choice, but it's where I could get work after graduating).
I can agree with you a little, because part of the reason I live in an apartment in town is broadband. I had the oppurtunity to move to the outskirts of town (just out of city limits) but didn't only because I didn't want to do the dialup thing.
Anyway, from my point of view (as a young single person), there's a heck of a lot more keeping small towns down than just the lack of broadband. If you haven't lived out in the middle of nowhere as I have and (to a lesser extent) currently do, these are things you might not have considered:
1. You can only buy the absolute necessities, usually. Even in my town which I assume is large compared to a "rural community", I can't buy fish unless its breaded and needs to be deep fried. There are no bookstores, coffee shops, or movie theaters. The only place to buy software for 50 miles is Walmart.
2. There is a small hospital here (because the entire county is sparsely populated, there frankly isn't a better place for one). But the more rural the community, the farther away you are from medical care. My grandpa died of a heart attack 12 or so years ago and perhaps could have been saved if it hadn't taken a small eternity to get him to a doctor. Soon afterward, his widow moved into town after living on a farm her entire life.
3. The culture is homogenized and philistine, not to mention frequently racist. What I wouldn't give to have regular face-to-face discussions with someone about something besides hunting, farming, or NASCAR.
And Etc. Certainly there are benefits to living in small communities, or even miles from the nearest neighbor. Peace and quiet, big yard, friendly people (as long as you don't stand out too much). (After you've done it for a while, though, the quaintness starts to wear off... it isn't attractive to start with unless you are already world-weary. Your kids will probably hate you for it. They leave the small towns, remember?) But the thing is, broadband is just one more thing that people who choose to live like that have to choose to give up. That small towns and the rural lifestyle are drying up is unfortunate in a way, and govt subsidized broadband would help that situation out incrementally, but it's just scratching the surface. We can't offer everything to these people simply because we can't afford to.
I would go so far as to say that even if we could, they wouldn't want it. Broadband, sure. But in the town near where I grew up, a large dairy and a pig processing plant almost went up (on separate occasions). The economic development commission wooed them, offered them huge low interest loans, but they ultimately decided not to build there, in part citing a lack of support from the community. People were up in arms. They wrote letters to the paper. It's been speculated that racism played no small part in all of this. What sort (or should I say, ethnicity) of people do you think would work in a pig processing plant in a small Texas town, after all?
Of course in those other places you didn't have to worry about some idiot pulling a gun, but you really could do nothing but accept the way things were in a society. Let the government take all the money, property and rights from you that they'd like. It's kind of funny that people with similar thought processes talk about how low crime is in countries with no guns amongst the citizenry --- completely ignoring crimes committed by the government. And as far as capitalism goes, you ignorant sod, Enron, Microsoft, and SCO are examples of Corporations. If you had any sort of sense to you, and knew anything about economics and modern socio-economic history, you might have known that the modern corporation is an intentional government construct. It's called "Market Socialism". Here's a pipe. Come and smoke it.
Speckpot?
It is apparent to me there is little competition in the broadband market in many parts of the US with the cable plant being a practical monopoly.
Several actions could be taken to open these up:
1. Cable plant owners should be forbidden from providing ISP services.
Cable plant providers have an advantage over competition if they provide ISP services. Providing ISP services also encourages policies (such as no servers) to keep other ISP markets (webhosting) lucrative.
2. Create a "National Backbone".
This will allow for cheaper upstream access driving the broadband access rates down. There are already many state and national government fiber networks that exist and have low utilization. These could be tied together to create a "National Backbone" that would be cheap and flexible enough to allow the edge to be very competative. Other countries are doing this (S. Korea, Estonia, China) using subsidies or government owned companies. This is one reason the US is not even in the top 20 for broadband penetration and one reason these countries economies are performing very well.
3. Deregualte more spectrum for public use.
This will encourage more aggressive wireless development.
4. Quit forcing telcos and ISPs to pay for phone tapping and carnivore like systems. This will reduce the end cost of telco services.
I recently moved back to the US after 8 years. In that time the broadband situation seems to have not improved. Sure it is available in a couple more locations but the price seems to have gone up and the service possiblilites down (no servers, horrible terms of service, long contracts, low reliability). In the same time most of Europe has caught up and surpassed the US in prices for broadband and terms of service conditions (not sure about reliability).
I do not see Bush moving in a positive direction with this. Powell (FCC Chairman) wants to allow more consolidation of cable plant providers (who are also ISPs) even though studies by several universities show this will be bad for consumers. I have heard no plans to provide a backbone or subsidise one or remove the tax burden on the telcos and ISPs. One positive is that I have heard Powell (FCC) has said that VOIP will not be regulated or taxed as telco service.
My $.02
and the whole telecom sector went bankrupt because no one was willing to pay for it. Remember the internet bubble burst?
Vote for Pedro