Greetings From the Most Connected Place on Earth

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:36:21 -0800
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Greetings From the Most Connected Place on Earth

Greetings From the Most Connected Place on Earth
Mon Feb 21, 4:00 AM ET
Joel Strauch, special to PC World
<http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&ncid=1093&e=1&u=/
pcworld/20050221/tc_pcworld/119741>

  IKSAN, SOUTH KOREA--When my wife and I arrived here last fall to teach
English, we stepped into perhaps the most Internet-crazed country in
the world. What tipped us off? Well, one example is that South Korea
(news - web sites) has a high school where students train in the game
Starcraft like Texas high schoolers practice football.

  That's easier to understand when you learn that South Korea is the
most Internet-connected country in the world. That connectedness makes
it very simple to play real-time online strategy games like Starcraft.
 From gaming rooms filled with high-end PCs to locals speaking freely
about downloading movies, it's clear that the Internet is firmly
entrenched in most South Koreans' daily lives.

  PC Bang a Gong

  For starters, there are "PC bangs" everywhere. Bang is Korean for
room, and there are at least ten of these computer rooms in my
neighborhood, each filled with dozens of high-end systems all networked
together and then riding a fat pipe to the Net. And I'm not even living
in a large Korean city.

  At first glance, a PC bang looks like a cubicled-office, with
high-backed, comfortable leather chairs in front of desks with LCD
screens. Smoking is allowed, and usually several of the mostly
college-age users are puffing away.

  The Koreans mostly play online role-playing games like World of
Warcraft and Lineage II or strategy games such as StarCraft. This game
is so popular here that there are two TV channels dedicated to showing
matches.

  You pay about a dollar an hour to use a PC bang. You can browse the
Web or check your e-mail, but most folks use them for gaming. Imagine
being able to have your own Counter-Strike LAN party on excellent
gaming machines for a buck an hour per person. That's what we've been
doing lately. Hoo-ah.

  Broadband at Home

  But what's more amazing is the near ubiquity of broadband in the home.
Two years ago, the South Korean government promised to expand the
broadband infrastructure to reach every household by the end of this
year.

  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.

  The majority of the broadband is DSL, but cable is also available.
Jae-ho Jang, a bar owner in Iksan, says that his package deal of cable
TV and cable Internet access costs him $17 a month, but other users say
that cable access averages around $30--still a lot cheaper than in the
States.

  And if you need ultrafast Internet access, it's available. Shin Cho,
an electronics lecturer at WonKwang University, has a 100-mbps network
at his home on the outskirts of Seoul that costs about $20 a month for
the broadband. "The reason that we can have this system at home is that
the cost of PCs and Internet service is pretty affordable for most
families in Korea," he says. The Korean government is planning on
having this level of broadband available to all of Korea by 2010.

  Cho says that the main user of their connection is his aunt, who uses
it for shopping and for staying connected to her online community of
photographers. "They exchange photos and view each other's work in the
community," he says. Online communities such as Cyworld
(www.cyworld.com) are extremely popular in Korea.

  I took an informal survey of one of my classes of adult college
students and professionals--80 percent of them had a broadband
connection. And even though they're fluent in English, it took a couple
minutes to clarify the term "broadband" because that's the only type of
Internet connection available. When asked if they had ever used a
dial-up connection, In Me So, a computer science major at WonKwang
University said, "I remember using a 56K modem once, about eight years
ago."

  Broadband is almost everywhere, says Cho. "It resulted from government
policies. The nationwide establishment of the broadband networks have
been strongly encouraged and concentrated with the current
administration," he says.

  Changing Lifestyles

  The ubiquity of broadband has affected a huge proportion of the
population. Downloading music, TV shows, and movies is done in large
numbers, especially among the college-age crowd. There aren't any
threats of lawsuits from the RIAA (news - web sites) to dissuade users,
and it's done so universally that most of the folks I talked to about
it don't really think of it as wrong.

  I used music downloading recently as a discussion topic for an
advanced level English class I taught. Every one of the students in the
class downloaded music files on a regular basis, and most of them
downloaded movies. Even some of my younger students are taking
advantage of their broadband--one seventh grader asked whether, if he
brought a burned copy of the third Harry Potter (news - web sites)
movie in on Video CD, we could watch it in class.

[snip]


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