Slashdot Mirror
American View On Korean Broadband Leadership
prostoalex writes "South Korea remains the world's undisputed broadband leader (in terms of penetration) with 25 broadband lines for every 100 people as of year-end 2004. But how did it come to that? Joel Strauch moved there to teach English and in his letter to PC World he portrays the everyday life in broadband heaven as well as names the reasons for Korean broadband dominance: 'An ambitious, nearly $11 billion program, it appears to be working. Studies have shown that over a quarter of Koreans have broadband and that anyone who wants it can sign up--with some ISPs charging as little as $19 a month for DSL. I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection--twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"
I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection--twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States
I live in a pretty high-cost area of the country and my 3 Mbit/sec service is less than $50/month from Comcast, maybe he left the US too long ago.
All I can see from here is the port scanning that continuously comes from their networks. And the lack of response when I try to report it to their ISPs.
So. Korea being the size of about New Jersey
might be the reason broadband has deeper penetraton than in the US.
Korea is insanely net-centric, almost to the point of absurdity (as anyone who's ever been to Seoul can attest), but it also has the benefits of being considerably smaller than the US, which makes it easier to run broadband. In the US we're seeing the commoditization of dialup where the prices for dialup service have dropped over time, and eventually once the market penetration gets to a certain point broadband prices will likely drop as well (especially if Wi-Max takes off.
However, when you're dealing with a country that's several thousand miles across rather than several hundred, it's harder to lay enough fiber/cable to make things work.
TANSTAAFL.
Another one bites the dust
- SBC (primarily it's PacBell portion)
- Verizon
- BellSouth
We would've long ago had a much higher penetration level, except they want to control the lines and the access.OCO is Loco
What's the point of 100Mbps though? A lot of servers are lucky to be sitting on their own 100MBps pipe. With the exception of P2P stuff, I'd imagine there's a point where additional MBps on a home line just aren't that significant anymore.
Who doesn't like free music?
I pay $80 a month for 600kbp up/down DSL and then another $120 to the phone company for the line. This is currently the fastest/cheapest we have seen and it is recent.
The phone company is slightly scamming in that they have listed on their page that the 256kbps line that I had been paying for through them could handle 1.5mbps downloads but the 256kbps was for the uploads.
But when I complained to them that I was getting nowhere near 600kbps downloads, they told me that I needed to upgrade my line with them (meaning in payment).
So I did that and now I am paying more, but still not getting the speed.
The ISP swears that they turned off the limits on my account, so I *should* be getting even 1.5mbps through them, but I am getting about 250kbps at best.
Lately when I try calling my home phone number, I can't get through and instead just get a blast of static and then a dead line.
I am assuming that is probably related to why my DSL speed sucks, but in order to get them to come look at it, for some reason I have to actually be here (none of the phone line is inside the house except for the short line that comes in through the wall to where I have my phone) - and I can't just leave me job and lounge around the house all day (were I an exec I could work from home, but I am the IT bitch at work, so that means I need to be there in person).
Just thinking about all of this wants me to smack someone.
But I live in Bermuda, and when I mention that to anyone, they assume that I spend my days lounging on the beach and don't have much sympathy for me. Of course, I am a nerd and don't care about the beach or sunburns, and right now it is COLD outside.
I envy the broadband of South Korea.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
If population density makes it so easy to provide fast & cheap broadband, why doesn't it exist in New York or San Francisco?
Obvious counter-example: Sweden.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If you include length of lines, then sparser areas would fair better. A larger country might have to bury more fiber to provide the broadband connections.
It seems to me that you would want to do something like comparing metro areas to metro areas, rural areas to rural areas. Even that doesn't work, as some countries have densely populated rural areas. The population distribution will be the single largest factor in determine broadband connections per person than any other factor.
I think the buildout is important. Ultimately in the limit I believe that you will get your entertainment content via the net (minus the pr0n we already receive). The idea is that you would visit webpages for the TV shows you like and support, you get billed directly and DL the show you like for a small fee. You watch it when you want commercial free. Movies also could be delivered this way. :) ).
Anyway, thats where I believe the BW will ultimately go. If I am wrong, then you are right 1..4mbs would be all you would need (barring p2p). (that last comment sounds a lot like 640k is all you need
Hedley
nearly $11 billion program ... I pay $30 myself ... twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"
Let's see here; he's crowing about how it "costs less" at $30 per month yet ignores the taxes collected to create the $11B system. Sorry people, it ain't cheaper; the costs are just hidden in the Koreans' taxes.
While this is certainly a major factor, it does raise a simple question. Why doesn't any random metropolis in the States have similar broadband numbers? While having a dense population makes it easier, it's not the reason why. Government policy is a major contributor.
Burn Hollywood Burn
If there was an 11 billion dollar government program to increase broadband penetration, then it doesn't cost each person in SK 30 bucks a month. It costs them 30 bucks a month plus that portion of their taxes which is going to subsidize broadband.
In the US we could pay nothing in broadband and have it be completely subsidized by the government. But we'd still be paying for it through taxes.
What worse about subsidization, even if you don't use broadband you have to pay for it, depending on how their taxation scheme works.
I am all for increasing US's broadband connections but it's not all bad here, there is far more internet penetration and PC's among the populace here than in SK.
Density helps some, but there are a lot of costs that you just can't cough at. I hear this comment too often to just leave as a fact.
Costs to run a CLEC
1. Administration / Laws / Taxes
I am assuming in this example that the pervayors of SK have similar restrictions and tax structures that the US does.
2. Inter-country fiber
Once again, one can make the assumption that SK has similar agreements with all 3rd parties for peering one another.
3. Inter-city fiber
This is where SK will save a lot of dimes in up front costs, and maybe a little bit over time. For fiber, I bet there aren't many ongoing costs unless they're renting the lines/land from someone else.
3. Intra-city fiber
The number doesn't change between KM and the US unless ther population density within cities are greater than that of the US. From reading stats on each country's overall density, it can be said that SK's cities are more dense, hence less cost per capita to deploy broadband (though incremental).
4. Subscriber concentrators
For DSL, this will need to be a few KM from each subscriber's home. The units themselves are relational to the number of customers plugging in and have relatively linear price scaling, so a concentrator in a small town of 500 subscribers would be around 1/4 the price of a town with 2000 subscribers.
5. Marketing
I could be wrong, but it seems that N.A. carriers spend a hell of a lot marketting their products to consumers. That money could have been better served deploying broadband to more people, or lowering their prices (yeah right). So, the economics of the two countries may make aquiring subscribers in SK cheaper.
Bye!
First off the broadband initiative in Korea is a government thing, and the entire wiring system was revamped for it, so everyone does have broadband. But compare to Japan, where 100mbps uncapped and unlimited connection can be purchased for just $20US a month in some areas. You can give everyone 1.5mb DSL "cheap", and adding a government initiative to that really helps saturation. But if you want to really look at a country doing things correctly you need to look at Japan.
Well, I am actually a South Korean studying in US for 5 years. Although the broadband infrastructure there is surely impressive, I am well aware of the limitations and problems associated with the net-frenzyness in South Korea.
..., well, that's only for some manias; it's really hard to grab a decent place for such things. The result is that more and more people are just relaxing at on-line rather than outdoors. Well, not very good for health. :(
..., most of them are just consuming digital merchandise having nothing to do with real life. For instance, I can hardly see handful of Koreans in any major open source project.
... posterior ... to see major South Korean webpage with non-WinIE browser. I really wonder if Korean web develoopers have ever heard of W3C. A handful of my friends and myself continue to protest and struggle, but things are never improving.
(1) Why so crazy for net?
First, as most of you already know, South Korea is about 20 times as densely populated as in the US. Even worse, more than half of the whole population live around Seoul, in a region that only counts one tenth of the country. I'm not mentioning the economy matters. Rather, I am pointing out that chances for sound outdoor activities are really scarce! For scuva diving, bike hiking, yacht and wind-surfing,
(2) So what do they do with net?
Next, because of that, most of the netizen activities of South Koreans are not very productive. Downloading pirated movies and musics, playing online games, creating and enjoying weird online communities,
(3) What's wrong with the digital consumerism? Why don't I like it?
These "digital consumerism" originated from the Asian economy crisis that hit South Korea at the end of 1997. To revive the economy, South Korean government encouraged IT industries and infrastructures, and lots of online contents providers are founded. One of the biggest investors were Micro$oft, and they provided support for developing M$-specific webpages; a screenful of images and ActiveX shits. That awful culture continues growing and growing, and now it's really a pain in the
In summary, I would say that although South Korean broadband infrastructure is decent, it's far from heaven in terms of what to do with that.
When I moved to Japan I had a choice of 50 Megabytes or 80 Megabytes. I took the 50 Megabytes because the Voice Over Internet Phone was integrated. You can also watch movies. Not only that Japan is rolling out 10 gigabyte to the house by 2010. If your feeling a little left out over there in generica, it is because you are! I can only imagine that the gulf will continue to worsen and more uses for the truly highspeed will happen every day here, and in generica you will still be gloating over your killer 1.5 megabytes. LOL