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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."
How can the U.S. and other countries learn from it?
They must learn the technique of Zerg rush, and then everything else will fall in line.
"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." Broadband penetration is good stuff...but me, I'm a fan of broadband girl-on-girl.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
But then again, he's also trying to get us to the moon and Mars.
I think that Americans could benefit from a committee established to promote the complete adoption of a nationwide FTTP network or other such network to connect us at faster rates.
Having broadband and a video cam, for instance, is no good for me, because my girlfriend has dial-up, thus limiting chat options. I blame lots of this on American capitalism, but perhaps if we get a Democratic congress again, this can be quelled.
I recently saw a 1.5 Mbps line referred to as "shitty" by a Japanese blogger. In America, that's supposedly pretty fast for a consumer. We need to look to countries like S. Korea for inspiration, stop trying to milk money out of customers by capping uploads and such, and just modernize our damn nation.
Help a college student
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?
..government involvement was bad?! I am confused!
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
Many US executives and policy makers are quick to dismiss the disparity, noting correctly that South Korea's densely populated areas have made it easier for telecommunications companies to offer extremely fast service to large numbers of people. But even with such geographic and demographic differences, the United States can learn some valuable lessons from South Korea's experience in jump-starting a broadband powerhouse.
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 dont think its really fair to stereotype all Koreans as obsessive Starcraft players. Plenty of them obsess over other online games such as Warcraft and Diablo2 as well.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
I think that the fact that South Korea is smaller in size than the US gives it an advantage of reaching that goal of theirs... On top of that, they might not have a bunch of communications giants (Cox Communications, Charter Communications, AOL-Time Warner, Sprint (DSL), Verizon (DSL) and Aldelphia, to name a few) fighting for customers left and right. When you have a fairly large country in size with a ton of providers offering different types of services at different prices it's harder to achieve a goal like "Broadband for Everyone".
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".
Wal-Mart would turn the broadband industry upside down. They'd do it cheaper than the others, and more "common" people in America would flock to the Wal-Mart name because of brand recognition. This alone would force the broadband companies to innovate.
This could also be applied to the cell phone industry.
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.
http://urban.blogs.com/seoul/ Always found this blog interesting, seems the right time to pass it on. :0]
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'm all for broadband, but I don't see the wisdom in doing it through government any more than I see wisdom in having the government provide food, shelter, charity, religion, education, employment, health care, etc. It might sound like a nice eutopia, but it's not sustainable without the competition introduced by a free and open market. The best example is our food. Food is THE necessity, even more than health care, etc. If the government provided it there would be little selection, less supply, and less quality.
You might look to the government to (at the threat of inprisonment) take money from everyone else to pay for what you want or need, but I'd rather people have the option to pay for what they want and help others in the way they see most fit. Most sane/intelligent people see the former as theft, but it's obvious that some view it as a way of life.
That's what government can do to improve broadband adoption. Stop trying to regulate businesses, and don't have any "initiatives". Let the free market take us where we want to go. I don't think that long run any of our problems will be solved by government, especially broadband adoption. Sure the government can make us pay more for broadband while we think we're paying less, since 30% income tax, tax on food,clothes,medicine,cars,travel are all acceptable, but $75/month for broadband is outrageous. Please, give me 5-10% flat tax and I'll be happy to pay more for market delivered goods, oh and give to charity and the needy.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
1. Everyone in korea speaks korean.
2. Noone else speaks korean.
3. Koreans are mainly interested in korean websites.
Ergo, when they pay $5 USD a month for 4mb internet accesss, the ISP is betting on the fact that they wont hardly have to pay for any international traffic.
Official GOD FAQ.
Just look at the problem that have have from malware.
One mydoom varient (or was it blaster, anyway) nearly knocked the whole country off the internet.
technology without knowledge/education is a bad thing (tm)
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.
Why is it the fault of "American Capitalism" that your neighbour has a no road to thier farm? Because somebody hasn't given her tarmac for free? I consider myself liberal, but really, isn't it going a bit far to expect your government to build you your damn roads?
Because state investment in infrastructure benefits everyone, sometime even in simple dollar terms. Even when large companies cannot make a profit from it.
* hollow laughter *
With OFCOM and BT in charge of it, I'm amazed we've even got ADSL.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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 $60USD for one month of broadband bliss (remember, including connection & installation).
While I'm at it - their TV stations here (KBS, MBC) offer live streaming of their TV channels PLUS video on demand of just about all programs they air. Who needs a TIVO here! (you've got to have at least 100kbps connection to enjoy it).
Alas you dont get very far if you dont speak Korean.
+1 Insightful
I tend to agree with you - but I'm not sure how successful this would be in practice. What happens if you invest in the broadband lines and the promised resultant economic boom never comes?
The Keynesian economic model suggests that putting people to work building projects that will stimulate economic growth is a good idea. However there have been many cases where the promised benefit never came while the corrupt contractors who are hired to do the work bleed society dry.
(I'm thinking Boston's Big Dig, the construction of large domed stadiums, those "urban renewal" design communities that have faded into new ghettos...)
"Bumblethink" is exactly correct, Mr. HarveyBirdman, as in your bumblethink. "Capitalism" is what has brought us such wonders as Enron, M$, SCO, etc. as the list goes on...As for the internet, thank God that TCP/IP is basically public domain and not "owned" by something like M$ or SCO or some other evil capitalist organization. And your depiction of Korea as a "primitive place?" ROTFL. I've lived in Korea (and Japan, etc.) and also had the misfortune to visit the USA. At least in those "primitive states", I didn't have to worry about some idiot pulling out a gun, with or without provocation, training, etc. And people wonder why Americans are considered arrogant, ignorant, etc. Americans would do well to keep their mouths closed, their ears and eyes open, and travel more, rather than blustering about in their usual arrogant, gun-at-the-hip, ego-mode-engaged blunderings.
if a government can not even educate their youth, then they have no right to tell other countries and governments how to run their countries
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?
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..."
and the whole telecom sector went bankrupt because no one was willing to pay for it. Remember the internet bubble burst?
Vote for Pedro