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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.
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
- 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
Indeed. $11 billion over the past two years? Distributed among the (rough guess) 13 million households? That's over $400/household/year they've been paying to get there.
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.
So. Korea being the size of about New Jersey
might be the reason broadband has deeper penetraton than in the US
New Jersey a population of about 8.6 million, of those about 693,000 were subscribed to broadband in 2003 or about 8%. This state is in the top 5 list of subscribers in America.
South Korea is about 38,023 sq. miles in size
New Jersey is about 8,721 sq. miles.
Virginia on the other hand is larger than South Korea, but close at 39,598 sq. miles. It would be less insulting to say that South Korea was the about the same size as on of the sothern states.
N.J. is smaller in terms of size and population than South Korea, yet has less in terms of percent of broadband subscribers.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
But then, it comes down to "what do we spend our tax money on? will we improve broadband connectivity for our citizens or will we interfere with other countries' business and pretend it is for a good cause"?
I would have to spend sigificantly more as an individual to get that sort of broadband vs my share of the costs if everyone was helping. In fact, if it wasn't for large tax-funded investments in technology like the internet, we wouldn't have the technology we have today.
I'm more than happy to pay taxes to support that (and other such endovers). I'm not happy paying taxes to support a war to help oil barons have easier access to some oil so they can get richer.
*elevator music plays*
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.