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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 suppose you could broadband wire all of new york city + the nearby cities for $11 billion also.
When I was living in Manhattan, I had Roadrunner which was 3Mbit/512Kbit (from what I could tell) and had no ports blocked, so I was running a web server off my main linux box. I believe we were paying around 50$ a month.
Right before xmas they upgraded or something because I was getting over 600K/sec on my downloads, which makes me think they upgraded to around 6Mbit (I did some math on my max speed, and it was almost exactly 6Mbit), but the upload speed didn't change.
I had to move back to NJ on new years day, so that was the end of my high-speed enjoyment. DSL service in this area is horrendous. Verizon offers home users only 768Kbit DSL for some 40$/month and where I happen to live, I'm too far from the central office, so I get constant disconnects and outages that last hours and sometimes days.
I opted to get speakeasy since I had become addicted to running a web server and they had a slashdot promotion where I get 8 IPs, so I'm in hosting heaven right now, but I pay 80$/month for 1.5Mbit/768Kbit. The 6Mbit package isn't available here.
i could have also gotten comcast but I had their service from 1998-2000 and became completely dissatisfied with their service toward the end (started out GREAT and Fast as hell, I'd get 800Kbyte/sec downloads and 800Kbyte/sec uploads, but they decided to cap everyone to 1% of the upload bandwidth and 10% of the download bandwidth). I was paying 60$/month for that, I believe.
Luckily, I moved to another area where I got Optimum Online, which, aside from the internet in college, was the fastest broadband I ever had. I was paying 40$/month, and used to regularly get 1MByte/sec downloads, and in the beginning, 400Kbyte/sec uploads, which, later, were capped to about 80Kbyte/sec when they blocked inbound traffic on port 80 because I codeRed, or one of those stupid worms.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
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.
Of course, the per capita income in Korea is about 1/2 that of the US, so spending $30 to a Korean is like spending $60 is to an American.
However it also generally comes with an SLA that gaurentees uptime, quality of service, and so on. That's the big difference for like Speakeasy ADSL/SDSL service. ADSL is a home-user type thing. No speed gaurentees, no uptime gaurentees, no upstream gaurentees. The SDSL is more professional, with gaurentees on all those things. It gets priority when being fixed, and you are compensated for downtime past a certian amount.
Now I'm not saying that's the right way to do it necessiarly, but that's often the reason for higher cost on symetric lines. They are sold as pro solutions that ahve higher levels of service. Well, that costs more money.
Also something I've noticed is that US broadband is generally very good about having sufficient upstream for your conneciton. If you have a 3mbps connection, your ISP has sufficient connections to support that and so on up. I've found that broadband from other countries that is often not the case with.
I was transfering files with someone from Europe, Sweden I believe but I can't remember, who was getting angry at me because he claimed I'd overlisted my connection. I'd listed it as a T3, which was quite accurate. At the time I worked for network operations on campus and had a very direct link to the core, which has 2x OC-3cs to the world. The network utilization was extremely low at the time, under 10% per line. Thus I was easily capable of doing T3 level transfer speeds, and I verified this on another site. Both the links were to large providers (Time Warner Telecom and AT&T) and high priority, thus the problem was not on my end.
Well, some investigation and testing reveled that he could get his full 10mbps to people on the same DSL network, but not to most of the rest of the world. There was either insufficient bandwidth or a rate limit somewhere higher up the chain. So the 10mbps DSL really wasn't. It would be like syaing you have a 100mbps line because that's the connection your comptuer has to your switch. Well yes, it'll get 100mbps to anything on that LAN, but not to the rest of the world.
I've encountered this a number of times with foriegn providers. It's certianly not universal, but seems far more common than in the US. You get extremely high bandwidth to the provider, and thus anyone on their network, but past that and maybe their peers it drops off sharply.
I'm not saying maybe SK doesn't have much better broadband, just saying that there are some reasons why things may cost more over here.
I understand your cynicism but your wrong.
In 1997 the Korean economy crashed and was bailed out by the IMF. Everything was in disarray and the goverment didn't have enough money to bail out the national banks. Bankrupt banks left all firms clamoring for money for investment and one of the designs for the 'new' Korean economy was building high-tech telecom. Meaning: give subsidies to rapidlly accelerate the growth of Korean telecoms so they would grow faster, expand into new markets and theoreticlly offer growth in new businesses.
In 1997, internet usage in Korea was nowhere. There wern't many PC rooms, people wern't playing real computer games, there wern't extensive 2g networks and it wasn't the Korea you read about today.
What's remarkable about the Korean story is that the goverment made positive steps to nuture explosive broadbrand growth. It's unheard of in the US because there hasn't been a real US equivalent since the space race. No one 8 years ago thought Korea would be able to bounce back from the massive economic depression but betting on broadband has had huge paybacks. Who would have thought Samsung could make 3g cellphones with 4mp+ cameras because broadband was so prevelent? Who would've guessed people stop watching TV because TV episodes can be streamed 24/7 for roughly 50 cents a pop? Can you believe that a nation of 50 million is roughly 25% of the world's WarCraft 3 players?
The story your missing is that the Korean subsidies wern't free money to 'rich' telecoms. It was subsidies that was strategicly used by the goverment to promote internet growth. The idea being that subsidies would roll over into positive effects for citizens; that has happened, no one imagined it would be so successful. Now, could you imagine what would happen if the US had a president that bet 100 billion on the internet?
So, instead of giving false facts, here's what the CIA world factbook says about SOUTH Korea:
Net Migration Rate: 0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2004 est.) read: no net emigration
Sex Ratio At Birth: 1.09 male(s)/female
Population Growth Rate: 0.62% (2004 est.)
Life Expectancy: total population: 75.58 years male: 71.96 years female: 79.54 years (2004 est.)
Literacy: total population: 97.9% male: 99.2% female: 96.6% (2002)
So, how does that stack up to the US?
Net Migration Rate: 3.41 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2004 est.)
Sex Ratio At Birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
Population Growth Rate: 0.92% (2004 est.)
Life Expectancy: total population: 77.43 years male: 74.63 years female: 80.36 years (2004 est.)
Literacy: total population: 97% male: 97% female: 97% (1999 est.)
So, basically - you're full of shit, and we have been trolled. However, I thought your bullshit should be shown for what it is - Bullshit. There is no such country called "Korea." They got pissed at each other and split up into North and South with SOUTH korea resembing the US and NORTH korea resembling a poverty stricken dicatorship. HAND.