America's Broadband Dream Is Alive-- In Korea 356
An anonymous reader writes "America's Broadband Dream Is Alive in Korea thanks to government encouragement, according to the NY times (free reg, etc...). But profits are elusive." The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
South Korea. (Score:5, Informative)
reg free link (Score:5, Informative)
lets not forget what type of economic system (Score:3, Informative)
so the governement told the telco to make broadband available every where and the telco did.
South Korea is so (un)wired it's scary (Score:5, Informative)
I was being made fun of by old people because my state-of-the-art US cell phone at the time was a "brick".
Obviously, broadband is just as widespread. My 80-year old grandmother doesen't even have a washing machine, but she has DSL, for crying out loud.
Canada? (Score:5, Informative)
Cities well wired? (Score:4, Informative)
...but I have ONE choice in cable, and last I checked, DSL wasn't being sold in my area by Bell- they don't offer DSL anywhere there's cablemodem access, because(gasp!) they don't want to compete. I think they may have started offering DSL now(they CO has been wired for DSL for many, many years), but the prices are absurd and there's a 96kbit upload cap. Yes, you read right, 96kbit! How am I supposed to upload cute photos to grandma, or "my files" they've always got some business-person-type harking about, for work, at 96kbit?
In lower/mid-westchester 2 years ago, I had 1.5mbit/768 for about $70/mo, and my choice of providers(I went with Speakeasy and paid a little more per month.) I was quite far from NYC, and Westchester doesn't have nearly the technology industry that most of eastern MA has.
Re:Fragile broadband lead (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, North Korea started their nuke buildup in the 1990's. They signed agreement with the US essentially not to do so in exchanges for food,energy equipment, and other stuff. Then they took their program underground. It has only now come out, now that they may have 2 nuclear devices. Now they are threatning overtly to use them against The US or Japan. Unspoken, is that North Korea would be willing to sell them to anyone. They already sell missile and other military tech to anybody.
It is pretty funny that you would suggest Bush is a fanatic and not suggest that of the North Korean dictator.
Cheap in Asia (Score:5, Informative)
However, a lot of people used the free dial-up service. So, broadband ISPs had to push to get customers. They have done things like offering extremely cheap service and promising amazing speeds. This is not only limited to Taiwan, similar broadband pushes have occurred in China, Hong Kong, and even South Korea.
To comment on timothy's blurb and the article, although the US is well connected it does not have the push that Asian countries go for. The $32/month internet service is quite expensive in South Korea. Although the US is widespread, laws and regulations have also hindered the spread of broadband. For instance, there is no law in the US forcing cable systems to have competitors when it comes to broadband internet. There may be other examples, but I will leave that to Slashdotters to discuss.
Re:No Need to Be Jealous of Korea: the American Wa (Score:5, Informative)
thousands want to emigrate. Few, if any Americans, want to emigrate to Korea.
Don't kid yourself, most immigrants do so for economic reasons. To get closer to the
captilatist Mecca that the USA is.
Is your "health care" system an aspect of your so called "nation of compassion"?
Size doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
From the article, here is a list showing the broadband penetration as a percentage of Internet households:
Re:And there is no North Korea either (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, and I suppose you're going to tell me that the abbreviation "DDR" didn't always refer to RAM either.
It's called "North Korea" simply as a conventional short-form of the name, much like how you would refer to "East Germany" and "West Germany" instead of DDR and BRD. "North Korea" simply has fewer syllables than "DPRK" and is similar to saying "America" and "Great Britain." Neither American continent is ruled by just one government and the island of Great Britain is a part of a larger government, but people still know what you mean.
Of course, if you really want to be technical, there is no "South Korea" either. It's the "Republic of Korea." Similarly, there is no Taiwan (even if you ignore the whole "One China Policy" thing). But who'd want to keep on reading sentences like "The United States of America borders on the United Mexican States" or "Some of the big players in Europe include the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Republic of France, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation." About the only country I can think of whose "formal" name is the same as the informal one is Canada, and I think that's at least partly due to the fact that adding any more words to it would require two official names (one English, one French).
didn't pay attn. in geography in school? (Score:2, Informative)
keep in mind to check the facts:
S. Korea [cia.gov] : 98,190 sq km
New Jersey [pe.net]: 20,295 sq km.
so by my math: S.Korea is roughly 5 times bigger than NJ, more like Indiana.
Oops.
Re:Much Easier in Korea (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Much Easier in Korea (Score:3, Informative)
The majority of Canada's population is concentrated near the border... where it's a little warmer.
Re:Canada's density makes it different (Score:3, Informative)
It has a telephone company^Wmonopoly called SaskTel [sasktel.com], which was the firt DSL provider in North America. "It is now available in 158 cities and towns across the province - and will reach 237 communities by the end of 2003"
Check it out here [wideopenfuture.ca] Apparently it was also the first in the world to release 3G mobile networking. It also built the largest fibre optic cabling network in the world. Don't know if that still holds though.
Re:Canada? (Score:4, Informative)
However, that doesn't account for everything. We're far enough north to be outside that 85% and everyone here is getting broadband for less than $35CAD ($24.50 USD -- and I'm paying $17.50USD now) and we've been on broadband for a couple of years. Most people I know are on broadband, and dialup is quickly becoming a historical artifact.
It was really bizarre for me to actually have to use my modem a few weeks ago when I was on a business trip... I had forgotten how slow dialup really was!
Re:interesting (Score:5, Informative)
And yes, I do care, because I'm American and computers are my bread and butter. I worry that we're losing our edge. People in Korea and elsewhere are rapidly embracing the technology, while all Comcast (my broadband provider) can think to do is raise rates and tell me not to use the Internet for anything too unconventional.
Funny you should mention Canada (Score:5, Informative)
With Timothy's typically unenlightened, American Apologist addendum to the original post, and I quote:
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
one would expect Canada, which is even larger than the US, less densly populated even in its populated areas, and much so in its rural areas, to have even less broadband availability than the United States. However, surprising as it is to many of my countrymen, broadband is both more widely availabe and less expensive in Canada, indeed, in rural Canada, than it is in downtown Chicago.
This wasn't always the case
No longer.
Although I live in the heart of the city, a mere 10 minute walk from the dense, commercial portion of the city commonly referred to as the "loop," I am unable to get affordable DSL at anything greater than 1 Mbit. This, in contrast to the very inexepensive, 2 Mbit and better offerings available to rural residents of Alberta.
The dichotomy between the United States and Korea (South) isn't one of geography, it is one far more closely related to the dichotomy between Korea (South) and Korea (North), i.e. the difference between a nation with a well managed telecommunications industry and one with a poorly managed telecommunications industry, and while America (The US) bears little resemblence to the deprivations of North Korea, we probably owe that more to a history of decent management which has only, since about the 1980s, become an ongoing condition of zero and even negative-sum gameplaying by our leaders, in contrast to North Korea's fifty odd year of starkly negative-sum policies.[1]
However, if those of us living here do not get off our butts and insist on good governance, for the good of the many and not just the few, we may find ourselves, in not so many generations at all, bearing a striking resemblence to the third world we so like to disparage. Indeed, arguably, in terms of health care and telecommunications, we already do. Let's hope the greed of the ruling class and their political pawns doesn't extend that to our home or, worse, our food supply.
[1]Negative-sum games are scenerios in which a player's strategy is to win in such a way that the overall wealth is decreased, but their sum total increases. Imagine starting out with three pies, throwing one in the face of your opponent, and then running off with the other two. Only two pies remain, but 2 pies are better for you than merely 1 1/2. Or imagine an intellectual property regime that impoverishes the culture of billions, but makes a few thousand people filthy rich, and a few million able to make ends-meet, if just barely.
Zero sum is where you compete for portions of a pool of wealth which neither grows nor shrinks. Assuming a fair outcome, you both end up with 1.5 pies. Assuming an unfair, but nevertheless non-destructive, zero-sum scenerio, the three pies remain in existence and are divvied up in some fashion favoring one party or the other.
Positive sum scenerios are of course the best, and in terms of physical goods (and limited supply), capitalism generally excels here (except in situations of monopolies, be they 'natural', such as roads and telephone wire, or through economic or political force, such as the East India Tea company in days of yore, or Microsoft today). In this scenerio a strategem is employed that results in the creation of additional pies, which may or may not be shared freel