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more on Why the future is in South Korea
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:41:49 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Bart Stuck <bartstuck () worldnet att net> Date: June 10, 2006 4:26:40 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: RE: [IP] Why the future is in South KoreaIn 1990 Korea Telecom initiated a network study, KT 2000, to take their
network to world class in the year 2000. I was engaged as a consultant,And suggested the following: South Korea has 80% of its population in Seoul
and five other cities, so deploy optical fiber rings into each city, And trunk them together to provide high speed digital transport for the chaebol. Once that is done, the rings can sprout new optical fiber tenacles: 1)for cellular telephony, 2)for CATV, and for 3)high speed datacommunications via xDSL and CATV modems (no World Wide Web in 1990). Each
of these Rollouts had pro forma income statements, with a revenue model and anexpense model (including equipment depreciation, operations, marketing and
sales) And each of these rollouts had to PAY FOR THEMSELVES. The study wascompleted in mid 1991, the management of KT said thank you (HQ has copies Of the final study, four inches thick, in Hangol), and the rest was history. The bulk of the investment went into the network in 1992-1995, and at the
very end, deploying PCs was a relatively small amount of total CAPEX. Bart Stuck -----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2006 3:31 PM To: ip () v2 listbox com Subject: [IP] Why the future is in South Korea Begin forwarded message: From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: June 10, 2006 10:32:33 AM EDT To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why the future is in South Korea Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com Why the future is in South Korea Smart investments in broadband there have paid off in the form of ahyperconnected society --and now we can start reaping the benefits of the
Korean experiment.By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor June 8, 2006: 3:43 PM
EDT <http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/08/technology/business2_futureboy0608/ index.htm>SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - I, for one, welcome our South Korean
overlords. Ninety percent of the country has blazingly fast, 3-megabits-per- second broadband at home, and similarly high-speed wireless connections on the road. The telecom market is fiercely competitive, and broadband service costs the consumer less than $20 a month. There are 20,000 PC baangs, or Internet cafes, where you can rent asuperfast machine for $1 an hour. Online gaming has become a way of life,
with nearly 3,000 South Korean videogame companies boasting combined revenues of up to $4 billion. As a result, South Korea has become the world's best laboratory forbroadband services - and a place to look to for answers on how the Internet
business may evolve. Smart bet on broadbandHow did this come about? In 1995, the South Korean government made what must
rank as one of the most shrewd and far-sighted investments in businesshistory. It spent big on a nationwide high-capacity broadband network that any telecom operator could offer service on, and offered subsidies so that
45 million Koreans could buy cheap PC's. Cost: a mere $1.5 billion. Fast-forward 11 years: Korea is now the most connected and Net- addictedcountry on Earth. There are a few American companies who have benefited from
the South Korean broadband boom: Blizzard, for example, makes a popularonline game called Starcraft which is so widely played in South Korea that two TV channels broadcast Starcraft matches between professional players.
But the most popular services are homegrown. Cyworld, for example, is a social network owned by a subsidiary of SKTelecom, the country's largest wireless provider. To an American eye, the
Cyworld service looks like a mixture of some of the hottest USproperties: it's MySpace meets Flickr and Blogger and AIM and Second Life.
Users have avatars that visit and can link to each other's "minihompy" - a
miniature homepage that's actually a 3-D room containing a users' blog, photos, and virtual items for sale.Cyworld's digital garage sales include music, ringtones, clothes for your
avatar and furnishings for your own minihompy.Cyworld has penetration rates that would make Rupert Murdoch, CEO of MySpace parent News Corp. (Research), green with envy: An astonishing 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s use the service. Celebrities and politicians set up their own minihompies, and the way to get ahead in twentysomething Korean
society is to found a popular Cyworld club, or chat room. Printing moneyMost importantly, Cyworld is a license to print money. The service itself is
free (and available on cellphones as well as online), but to buy all theextras - like ringtones and virtual furnishings - will cost you "acorns," the service's virtual currency. Cyworld sells its users $300,000 in acorns
every single day. [snip] Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as BartStuck () att net To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/
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