Seoul of a New Machine

dahamsta

Seoul of a New Machine
South Korea shows us the transformative power of broadband.
By J. Bradford DeLong

For the past century, people around the world have looked to the United States to see what their own futures will be like. The US has led one technological and sociological change after the next. Except where broadband is concerned. In this respect, if we want to see the future, we need to look across the Pacific.

Counting both DSL and cable modems, 15 percent of American households have broadband connections. This take-up is dwarfed by that of South Korea, where more than two-thirds of households have high-speed connections. Moreover, throughput there is better: from 4 to 64 times as much bandwidth as I seem to get from Comcast. And about half of South Korea's 50 million people surf the Web regularly, sometimes from their cell phones. (Some 23 million of the country's 30 million cell phones are Internet enabled.) Much has been made in the press about the cultural differences between South Koreans and Americans to explain this vast gap in broadband penetration. But such explanations fail to grasp the significance of what's really happening.

Widespread broadband access in South Korea - and the consequent high-bandwidth applications - means that the Internet has become an accepted mode of social interaction: a true "information superhighway," as politicians used to love to say. This spring, users there spent about 62 hours a month online, roughly 14 hours more than users did in America, where dialup access and slow downloads are still prevalent. What's more, 16 percent of South Korea's GDP originates in the IT industries, compared with 8 percent in the US.

The shape of the future, however, depends not just on infrastructure but on what will come from it. How are South Koreans using their broadband Internet (aside from oft-cited multiplayer online games)? What do these uses show us about the future?

First, they point to a shift in the way citizens interact with government, from one of long lines and grouchy clerks to one of point-and-click. South Korean businesses have saved big bucks by giving customers and employees direct, user-friendly access to their databases. They've cut out whole categories of work in which people filled-out forms by hand, then others typed the information into databases. These same efficiencies are attainable in citizens' dealings with their governments - if enough of the population has high-speed access to justify creating such streamlined, Web-based systems. In Korea, enough people do.

Also, watch as government elections are transformed. South Korea's presidential campaign last fall featured, in the eyes of some, the first true Internet race. As The Globe and Mail reported, Roh Moo-hyun's campaign staff pressed a few computer keys, sending text messages to the cell phones of 800,000 people. Each day, half a million people visited his Web site, and some 7,000 voters sent him email. Call it cyberspace campaigning - a way to bring to every voter a close simulacrum of personal contact with a candidate and his staff. In the US, such access is still reserved for insiders and attendees of major fundraisers.

On the entertainment front, South Koreans are using broadband for video-on-demand. Yes, video-on-demand. Internet service there is of high enough quality for people to download movies instead of watching only scheduled programming. Last year, telco KT began offering on-demand viewing and special hardware to connect customers' PCs to their TVs. And watching what you want when you want to will be a very different social experience than viewing what happens to be on. Most interesting of all is how broadband may change South Korean society.

South Korea's experience so far with broadband access and high-bandwidth applications reminds us that they are called information technologies for good reason. Koreans eliminate wasted time in acquiring information and seem to communicate more easily. Their broadband Internet lets people play with and talk to each other without journeying to central locations, meshing schedules, or playing interminable games of telephone tag. There is also the obvious convenience of shopping online.

What difference does it all make? My best guess (based on scattered anecdotes about usage patterns) is that South Koreans, with all their time online, are saving themselves perhaps as many as five hours a month by finding what they want to buy and learn about more easily. They are discovering interesting circles of friends and conversation partners. They are freeing themselves from the tyranny of scheduled TV programming. And they are becoming a smarter, tighter, and more knowledgeable society.

Contact J. Bradford DeLong at www.j-bradford-delong.net.

molinaalexis

Mr_Man

This is the stuff that Larry Elison and others were preaching about 10 years ago - BT even had some VOD trials at that time.

It is interesting to see it finally coming to fruition. I wonder how long it will take to reach this 'rat' infested Island

M.

OHP

Originally posted by Mr_Man
It is interesting to see it finally coming to fruition. I wonder how long it will take to reach this 'rat' infested Island
M.

We have Rats in Ireland? :rolleyes:

OHP

Urban Weigl

Originally posted by OHP
We have Rats in Ireland? :rolleyes:

Sorry, don't get the joke?

Mr_Man

The Eircom 'rat'......


M.

Capt'n Midnight

it costs €4.5 bn to connect 85% of us to fibre...

hang on - if you did that the number of people who could telecomute would probably be enough to cut back on road-building to pay for it..

it is inline with the 3.8bn that's needed for the trains...

jesus_thats_gre

Did Eircom not want to over TV over broadband 2 years back but were refused the right to do so?

And is this not one of the reasons BB seems to be held up until now? Muck should be able to tell me if I am right or wrong here.

Urban Weigl

Originally posted by jesus_thats_gre
Did Eircom not want to over TV over broadband 2 years back but were refused the right to do so?

The actual reason was that Eircom's phone lines were too badly screwed up, so it did not work very well.

jesus_thats_gre

Was it not that the cable companies has signed exclusive rights to offering such a service?

spongebob

/me cant remember but JTG is probably right

TV over DSL was trialled in the BT village in East Anglia in the early 1990s

It is thought that 6 or 8 mbit is needed to do it properly. Most dslams in ireland are g.lite compliant which means that the kit can be cranked to 1500/512

Consider it a next generation DSL product .

M

Urban Weigl

That's very possible, though I heard the main reason was that it actually just didn't work properly, as the technology requires very good phone lines, somethign which we simply do not have.