Posted on 05/05/2003 11:28:25 AM PDT by glorgau
SEOUL, South Korea--As Cho Won Hee zips effortlessly from one Web site to another, his doting mother at his side, it is easy to understand why Silicon Valley views South Korea as the promised land of instant access to the Internet.
The Chos' high-speed digital line--100 times faster than the typical dial-up connection in the United States--is their zippy gateway to home entertainment, education and shopping, all for $32 a month. And despite the relatively recent arrival of such connections, the Chos, like many Koreans, are already as addicted to their broadband hookup as most Americans are to their television sets.
The Chos are at the cutting edge of South Korea's grand experiment with all things broadband, the catch-all name for high-speed digital connections. With a hefty push from the government, South Korea's telecommunications providers have built the world's most comprehensive Internet network, supplying affordable and reliable access that far surpasses what is available in the United States, even in those homes that have their own broadband setup. And now that most of the nation is online at high speeds, South Koreans are shifting more of their analog lives to their computers, where they watch soap operas, attend virtual test preparation schools, sing karaoke and, most of all, play games.
By embracing broadband so heartily, Koreans have turned their country into a test case for the visionaries who, just a few years ago, imagined a future of nearly infinite digital possibilities. While those dreams have hit speed bumps in the United States and elsewhere, South Korea--with Japan not far behind--is racing ahead.
In the process, Koreans are offering a glimpse of what wired societies are supposed to look like, where fast Internet connections vastly increase access to information, help lift productivity and create new markets.
"The killer application of the Internet is speed," said Lee Yong Kyung, the chief executive of KT, formerly known as Korea Telecom, which controls nearly half of the country's broadband market. "The money is in the pipes."
But maybe not yet. Intense competition and overbuilding has made prying profits out of building those pipes difficult. And while some content providers have flourished, many others still exist on government subsidies. Broadband has also spawned worrying social trends, some say, raising concerns about children addicted to online games and a growing digital divide between the young and the old.
This is not unexpected, given the extraordinary pace of change. Since 1998, telecommunications companies here have installed nearly 11 million broadband lines, over 5 million of those in the last year alone. High-speed lines now reach significantly more than half of all homes with Internet access.
The numbers are startling, given that South Korea was among the nations hardest hit by the Asian financial crisis just half a decade ago. But rather than retrench, the country turned a disaster into an opportunity. Spending on broadband and other high-technology gear helped lead a transformation of the economy, pushing the overall information technology sector to about 13 percent of economic activity and making South Korea much less dependent on heavy industry.
"In Korea, there was a sense of crisis, and they needed to take aggressive action to keep up with globalization," said Izumi Aizu, who runs the Tokyo-based Asia Network Research. "In the U.S., the Internet has turned into a very conventional business."
By racing the fastest down the information highway, Korea has highlighted how far the United States has to go. Though broadband connections are increasingly common in America, service is comparatively expensive and coverage spotty.
Short-circuiting on cash
Telecommunications companies in the United States, from start-ups to long-established businesses, spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build fiber-optic networks, but many ran out of cash before they brought those lines the "last mile" to people's doors.
When it comes to high-speed penetration of the home, the United States lags well behind South Korea and Canada, and has slipped below Japan.
This is nonsense. The Chos' high speed digital line is also 100 times fast than the typical dial up connection in S.Korea! What's their point?
What does all of this mean? WEll, simply put, the HSIA providers have to get their $hit together. I can't wait to move to another No. VA location that has HSIA as an option.
Illustrating Parkinson's law of spam:
"Trash expands to fill the bandwidth available"
One day there will be nothing but paid entertainment on the internet.
I guess then they'll let us have some of the TV spectrum to send email over.
Then why don't you get busy getting rich offering Americans 10MB connections for $30 a month? Your opinion could use a dose of supply and demand...
Unless we want the Government (that's us tax payers) to subsidize the development of services in these areas it's unlikely anyone will.
Check you recent phone bill to see how much the government is already taxing us to provide "free access" to the Internet.
There is a huge difference between a 10-Mbps hand-off and a 10-Mbps circuit to the core. Having a 10-Mbps hand-off does cost about $30/month in a densely packed city. But it is pretty damn useless when they are muxing it at 100:1 at the core. The only true bandwidth is bandwidth to the core. And there is no way that will cost you $3/Mbps. Try more like ten times that figure, and that is wholesale Tier-1 pricing.
The speed of the circuit to your house is the upper limit on how fast your connection can be. But the actual speed of that circuit is set at the core, completely independent of the speed of your hand-off. Lots of broadband companies take advantage of most people's ignorance of the difference and market the hand-off speed rather than the true core circuit speed. You don't get something for nothing.
Which isn't to say that US broadband couldn't be a lot better, just that this foreign broadband isn't nearly as good as it sounds. And most people can't tell the difference anyway. The computer I am typing this from has multi-homed full-bandwidth gigabit fiber connections directly on the Internet backbone, but the Internet doesn't feel any faster here than my DSL connection at home. Why? Because the Internet has been optimized around the assumption of clients with roughly DSL circuit speeds and many major segments and branches of the Internet backbone are poorly engineered to handle ubiquitous multi-Mbit client connections and will degrade performance to roughly DSL levels anyway.
Amazing!
Our baseline technology is old..being able to start fresh in a country with NO infrastructure would allow the very latest to be your baseline But then again I waste enough time with dialup...I only dream of how much more I could waste with broadband
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