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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.'"
We all know the importance of quickly downloaded porn and illegal games :)
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.
You can play Starcraft perfectly well on a 56k line.
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You can get 100Mbps for $50(US) in Japan and ditto in Sweden for $40.
That includes VoIP service.
Anything less is stoneage.
Hedley
I'm willing to bet he has a 1.5Mbit/sec bidirectional DSL line, rather than the "3Mbit/sec down, 512Kbit/sec up" line that Comcast is most likely selling you.
For that kind of bidirectional speed, you're looking at $100/month or so here...
- BBK
I suppose you could broadband wire all of new york city + the nearby cities for $11 billion also.
TANSTAAFL.
Another one bites the dust
- SBC (primarily it's PacBell portion)
- Verizon
- BellSouth
We would've long ago had a much higher penetration level, except they want to control the lines and the access.OCO is Loco
I have odds that when he declares war on Korea, he forgets which pole he's attacking, or just omit the geographic element all together.
Bye!
If population density makes it so easy to provide fast & cheap broadband, why doesn't it exist in New York or San Francisco?
Obvious counter-example: Sweden.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If you include length of lines, then sparser areas would fair better. A larger country might have to bury more fiber to provide the broadband connections.
It seems to me that you would want to do something like comparing metro areas to metro areas, rural areas to rural areas. Even that doesn't work, as some countries have densely populated rural areas. The population distribution will be the single largest factor in determine broadband connections per person than any other factor.
When I was living in Manhattan, I had Roadrunner which was 3Mbit/512Kbit (from what I could tell) and had no ports blocked, so I was running a web server off my main linux box. I believe we were paying around 50$ 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.