more on Om Malik on: Shrinking consumer broadband choices?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: October 16, 2004 4:44:44 PM GMT+01:00
To: dave () farber net
Cc: gerry-faulhaber () mchsi com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Om Malik on: Shrinking consumer broadband 
choices?

> As far as I know, there is no prize to be first to 95% HH
> penetration.

South Korea has already won it.  They did a very aggressive broadband
rollout a couple of years ago, wired up everyone's house, installed
servers in schools, etc.  The result?  Well, gee, what would you
expect if you suddenly hooked up several million new PCs with really
fast connections, running software with the famous Redmond WA quality,
with instructions in a language that most locals can't read so that
most of it isn't even configured right?

There is so much spam, zombies, trojans, you name it, from Korea that
many networks don't accept any mail from Korea at all.  Some networks
firewall out the whole country at the routers.

In self defense I set up an e-mail DBSBL called korea.services.net,
initially for my own use, but that has become popular all over the
world, judging from both the server logs and the queries from Korea
"why are you blocking my mail to Malaysia?"  I have a standing offer
to unblock any network that shows little spam traffic, which I've now
done for three small nets, but most networks including the two
largest, Kornet and Hanaro, are beyond horrible.  The Korean
government finally understands the problem, but progress is very slow.

This is not unlike upgrading a country's transportation system by
dropping off a Maserati in everyone's driveway with an instruction
booklet in Italian in the glove box.  What did they expect?

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () taugh com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com



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