American View On Korean Broadband Leadership 527
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 $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"
population density (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Size (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
Right before xmas they upgraded or something because I was getting over 600K/sec on my downloads, which makes me think they upgraded to around 6Mbit (I did some math on my max speed, and it was almost exactly 6Mbit), but the upload speed didn't change.
I had to move back to NJ on new years day, so that was the end of my high-speed enjoyment. DSL service in this area is horrendous. Verizon offers home users only 768Kbit DSL for some 40$/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.
Re:Size (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? Why do you think that?
Re:Size (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is what to do with it (Score:1, Interesting)
Korea has a higher percentage of users than the US, but has not shown leadership vs. the US in answering the central question of what to do with broadband. That's why I have a hard time listening to talk of Korean BB "leadership."
Re:Port scanning (Score:3, Interesting)
Those are zombied Windows machines. Korea produces porportionately more zombie spam than other countries because its bandwidth is relatively higher.
The zombied machines are all Windows machines. Windows is heavily used in Korea because for a long time it had better Korean language support than Linux. Now that Linux has caught up and with the Korean government backing of Linux, that will slowly change.
In the meantime, don't criticize Korea, criticize Microsoft.
Re:Leadership? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't wait for legal film downloads.
That said, if you're just using the net rather than serving stuff, a couple of megabits and a little patience works just as well.
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Port scanning (Score:3, Interesting)
Let them trim down their spamlist and only leave
Local Monopolies still rampant (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems we love monopolies here in America since it's taboo to meddle with business too much.
30euros (40usd) for 20mbit in France (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:3, Interesting)
the DSL marketers can call cable "shared" bandwidth technically, because it fundamentally is. the only thing that limits how much a cable modem can pull from the area node is limited only by the firmware of the cable modem.
if the node were to be overtaxed by users, it would indeed slow down.
but the connection to a DSL suffers the same fate, just in a more traditional sense. DSL networks have ALOT more than 45x 1mbps lines per "DS3/T3" upstream connection. Think about it for a moment, this has been the way it always has been. The provider has way less bandwidth available at all times than what the customers could possibly demand. This has been the only way to cost effectively resell bandwidth and access.. It's been that way since modems, remember modem pools? you would often have a 10:1 ratio of customers per modem, and that was GOOD.
same with DSL, same with cable, its all the same really. If a DSL network is overloaded, it suffers the same fate as an overloaded cable network.
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Port scanning (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Korean Leadership is an "E-myth" (Score:2, Interesting)
'E-Korea' - Myth versus Reality [1stopkorea.com]
Here is a brief excerpt:
Buying a Cell Phone
"Hi, I'd like to buy a cell phone."
"B . . . b . . . but you're a foreigner."
"Yeah, thanks, I'm aware of that. Now, can I buy the phone?"
"Well no, we don't sell to foreigners."
"Really? I printed this out from your website. It says you do."
"I don't care what our website says. We don't sell to foreigners."
He then goes on to describe his problems with broadband internet access. Check it out!
Re:Size (Score:2, Interesting)
I live due west of DC, not even 10 miles from the beltway, no DSL service out here... its a DSL deadzone or something... There's a CO about 3 miles west, and 5 miles east... none north or south...
somehow in the ISP's 'attempt' to expand, they wanted to hit the farmland before they touched the very profitable high-population area's...
And nobody here likes Cable, it's soooo horrendous... but because it's the only option for anyone within a few miles of my area... we have horrendous bottleneck issues... I'm lucky to get ping times under 100ms even on the shortest hops outside the cable network.. and speeds over 3mb/sec....
Also, I sware the cable company has an 'anti-gaming' block on the service, I can't stay connected to an online game more then an hour to save my life... (On my Xbox, Ps2, or any of my 4 computers... and no, I only play one of them at a time, even if I run the line right to the computer/console I cant stay connected)...
All I can say is, before you move somewhere, make sure you can get DSL -AND- cable.. never gonna know which one will crap out
Re:Korean Bigotry: Don't be Jealous of Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
Net Migration Rate: [cia.gov] 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.
Re:Port scanning (Score:3, Interesting)
Just A Few Other Observations Here In S. Korea... (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in Korea, when you get cellphone services, they talk to a representative via MSN Messenger or suitable application to activate your line in real-time without having to pickup a phone.
Osan AB has broadband through out all the dormitories, though SSRT (Samsung Rental) has a monopoly on that so they get away with charging insane costs. Something like $45 just for DSL... and really horrible TOS threatening $1000 fine for running anything resembling a "server." But 300kbps downstream is rather nice coming from the States where I'd be lucky to hit 90kbps.
S. Korea is paradise
Re:Doesn't sound so wonderful (Score:2, Interesting)
I could have opted for the cheaper $20 a month for 20meg adsl, but for that I'd have to pay another $20 a month for an NTT phone line (It's almost unheard of that someone living here doesn't have a cel phone these days, so land lines are not so popular anymore). I'm also setting up a high-speed vpn between my home and a few of my friends so that we can all access a pool of files easily, and for that I need upstream bandwidth as well as down.
The biggest player in Japan atm is YahooBB, and I don't think they offer anything less than 12meg anymore.
If an isp tried to flog something as pitiful as 1.5mbps connections here, they wouldn't last long.
My fastest download to date was a 650mb iso from KDDI labs in 5 minutes, which is pretty decent...
Re:In-depth criticism from a South Korean (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, 'glad to know I'm not the only one feeling that way. I tried going to a few Korean websites, but before too long, I got tired of their overloaded (with Flash and other unnecessary junk, not to mention ActiveX) websites. It's been a really long time since I've seen a good Korean website with clean, nice design. Even webmail services (like hanmail (accessible from daum.net)) are so bloated that I recently moved my dad off of his old e-mail address at hanmail and gave him a POP3-accessible Gmail account.
One of the worst website (popular in Korea, obviously) was cyworld.com. The website doesn't work at all (well, at least one of the major functions, i.e. requesting to be someone's "relation", doesn't work) in any browser but IE. I thought of accessing it at school (since my sister and all my cousins use it), but, bah, it got to be too much of a hassle.
So, nowadays, I just hang around good old English websites---it's not like I'm missing anything useful by not going to Korean websites, and the ones that might be worth going to are offshoots of well-known English projects (Wikipedia, TLDP... if that's still alive) anyway.