Why Internet Connections are Fastest in South Korea

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Guess what?!?! South Korea has faster internet than the U.S. does (along with 16 other countries)! Making matters worse, internet access in South Korea is almost half the price we pay! Blame [H] reader J-Will for the news. ;)

Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai. And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too.
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I wonder how many choices the Koreans have per town. Ours cost so much because we don't have many choices and they know we want it regardless of the cost.
 
US: 3,794,101 sq mi , avg 83 people/sq mi
SK: 38,622 sq mi, avg 1296 people/sq mi

It would be more reasonable to compare us to countries with similar landmasses. Russia, Canada, PRC, Brasil, Australia.
 
Funny that the first reason listed is competition.

I thought the United States was supposed to be the leader in free-market capitalism? Doesn't a market kind of need competition? Or maybe American capitalism just likes a few super big companies?
 
My wife is S. Korean and last time I was in Seoul her parents had a fairly old PC running XP and the internet speed was blistering. I had a laptop that I brought from home because I was teaching an online class during the summer (I'm an IT Instructor at a large Comm. College in NC) and my wife's sister set up a router so I could use my LT and it was smooth sailing. I'm not sure how much they pay, but it is fast. There are also Internet Cafes on every street next to the Karaoke bars. I also got to go to one of the largest computer areas in Seoul. It was 6 or 7 floors of stuff. 1 Floor was all cell phones, 1 was PC, 1 was TV, etc. Very overwhelming, but fun.
 
America ass rapes us because they can and we let them by buying into it.
 
Yup, I have exactly one choice for high speed in my apartment so I have no choice but to pay up whatever the hell they ask. Really pisses me off and there is not a damn thing I can do about it either.
 
LightningCrash said:
US: 3,794,101 sq mi , avg 83 people/sq mi
SK: 38,622 sq mi, avg 1296 people/sq mi

It would be more reasonable to compare us to countries with similar landmasses. Russia, Canada, PRC, Brasil, Australia.
Click to expand...

While that maybe somewhat true, it still doesn't explain why major US cities have horrid broadband even with massive population densities.
 
LightningCrash said:
US: 3,794,101 sq mi , avg 83 people/sq mi
SK: 38,622 sq mi, avg 1296 people/sq mi

It would be more reasonable to compare us to countries with similar landmasses. Russia, Canada, PRC, Brasil, Australia.
Click to expand...

If population density were the main reason, then dense U.S. cities would be crawling with cheap and fast Internet, and less dense rural areas would drag our national average speed down and average price up. While this is marginally true, it doesn't account for the relatively poor price/performance ratio we find in even our most densely populated areas.

The unfortunate fact is that our communications companies are run by a bunch of asshats, which is the real reason why we're all paying more for less.
 
Some of you guys are totally missing the mark, but at least one poster here nails it. Population density plays an insanely big role in stuff like this. I get so jealous at the kind of internet speeds you guys can get in cities like LA and NY because I pay more and only get a fraction of the speed here in Cincinnati. The larger the population density you have, the lower the marginal cost per person is.

Some of you guys havn't noticed, but America is one freakin huge piece of land. It costs money to setup and maintain the infrastructure necessary for internet access.
 
Government, if you thought our problems were a disaster.

Wait till you see our solutions!

The problem is infrastructure, I want FIOS. If Verizon would have Fiber laid within 10 miles of me, I'd move there, easily, without question.

The phone and cable lines are monopolized. If my little mom & pop cable co had to compete with Time Warner or others on products, instead of having a monopoly on an area, then things would change.

It should be = to what gas and electric are like, you buy the product, and it gets sent down the transmission pipeline by whoever owns the lines, no matter what aggregation company you purchase from.

Thats whats needed imo. Throwing money at the problem won't do it, throwing money that nobody had to EARN doesn't fix shit. I.E. when your tax dollars are redistributed to "fix" these things.
 
amdgamer said:
Some of you guys are totally missing the mark, but at least one poster here nails it. Population density plays an insanely big role in stuff like this. I get so jealous at the kind of internet speeds you guys can get in cities like LA and NY because I pay more and only get a fraction of the speed here in Cincinnati. The larger the population density you have, the lower the marginal cost per person is.

Some of you guys havn't noticed, but America is one freakin huge piece of land. It costs money to setup and maintain the infrastructure necessary for internet access.
Click to expand...

I've lived in rural areas and cities and except for the most rural of areas (Western states away from any metro area) there is very little difference between the price or speed available.

Right now I live in the DC metro area and 16/8 service runs me something along the lines of $55 a month. This is in a venry high density area and would probably cost half that if there was any competition at all. My parents live in a very rural area far from any major city and get 12/6 service for about $50 a month.

The problem is that in both places there is only one possible service provider, the cable company. The phone company wouldn't garuntee they could provide DSL due to the location of my apartment in the building and thats not available in many rural areas.
 
My friend just moved there, claiming how fabulous his internet speed was for the price. So I set him up an account on my ftp and he's downloading at 100k/sec. I've got 25/25 fios. My brother on the other side of the state gets 1.8MB/sec, maxing his comcast connection. That blistering speed is only for stuff over there, once you have to hop all over to get to usa based stuff, or much else I'd imagine, the speeds fall drastically. So keep that in mind.
 
Some people need to RTFA.

The post at CNN covered the geography issue. It is a factor to some extent.

But in reality it is about competition and there is little. Where I'm at we have fios, comcast and dsl for those who don't grok why fios is cool.

Oddly, the prices for like tiered services are about the same. Almost as if they were not really competing.

I think the news bit covered the main reason for this: SK made it a national priority to rock the intertubes. It's only a matter of time before various retards start calling any FCC broadband desuckification push either (choose as many as you think apply): Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Pedobearism. Then they will say "why does my internet go slow! Government, DO SOMETHING! Keep government out of arpanet!

Result: nothing will happen. Hilarity with sign holding idiots will ensue.
 
South Korea is approximately the size of the state of Kentucky. Of course its going to be easier to wire such a small area for a lot more speed than the whole United States. Anyone reading more into this has a political agenda to push.
 
I like how peoples logic stops right as they reach smaller area = easier to do.

Okay, then explain things like LA, Detroit, NY etc not having 1gb symmetrical. It is part of the problem, but is not the end.
 
LightningCrash said:
US: 3,794,101 sq mi , avg 83 people/sq mi
SK: 38,622 sq mi, avg 1296 people/sq mi

It would be more reasonable to compare us to countries with similar landmasses. Russia, Canada, PRC, Brasil, Australia.
Click to expand...

Not it wouldn't, what about mass populated cities and areas? They still have slow Inet compared to the rest of the world.

the issue is the U.S backbone is all old copper, where as most asian countries started their back ends with Fiber.
 
you think the U.S. is bad... at least you have *some* choices.. if not many, unlike canada which is a duoloply... and the government / CRTC sanctions and allows them to get away with it, without any pretense of pretending to be trying to fix it for the customer. Say Hello to 75GB caps on all internet!
 
J W said:
Funny that the first reason listed is competition.

I thought the United States was supposed to be the leader in free-market capitalism? Doesn't a market kind of need competition? Or maybe American capitalism just likes a few super big companies?
Click to expand...

It's hard to grow and expand a service with new companies when you have the iron fist of Government around your throat.
 
Hmmm... competition and low cost? Let's see...

For my apartment here in Sweden I can pick between one cable operator and a bunch of telecom operators offering 5-50 Mbps at ~ $25-50/month.

Or I can do it the way I do: Just plug an Ethernet cable into the wall socket and get >50 Mbps Internet connection for free! (The cooperative building-society provides the service as part of a general value increase for the apartments.)

Cheers
Olle
 
so you pay more upfront for your apartment to get free service.... :| you paid to get free service... :|
 
Lol...Then you guys probably never seen what internet costs in my country(Bahrain):

 
LightningCrash said:
US: 3,794,101 sq mi , avg 83 people/sq mi
SK: 38,622 sq mi, avg 1296 people/sq mi

It would be more reasonable to compare us to countries with similar landmasses. Russia, Canada, PRC, Brasil, Australia.
Click to expand...

I imagine landmass would play a big role not just because of population density, but cost of updating infrastructure.

The slow roll-out of Fibre here is quite expensive and.. sssslllloooooooowwwww.
 
amdgamer said:
Some of you guys are totally missing the mark, but at least one poster here nails it. Population density plays an insanely big role in stuff like this. I get so jealous at the kind of internet speeds you guys can get in cities like LA and NY because I pay more and only get a fraction of the speed here in Cincinnati. The larger the population density you have, the lower the marginal cost per person is.

Some of you guys havn't noticed, but America is one freakin huge piece of land. It costs money to setup and maintain the infrastructure necessary for internet access.
Click to expand...

Yet everyone who uses this argument fails to see that the sheer number of people (read paying customers) the US has compared to these other countries. Companies sacrifice their first born to be able to sell us stuff. Everyone loves to talk about land mass, but never bring up all the potential customers the US has.
 
static21 said:
Ive got 20 megs down and 5 up for 65, kind of expensive i guess
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I pay the same for 6-7 megs down / 2 up. That's the cheapest high-speed plan in this area, with only one provider, Comcast.
 
stiltner said:
The phone and cable lines are monopolized. If my little mom & pop cable co had to compete with Time Warner or others on products, instead of having a monopoly on an area, then things would change.

It should be = to what gas and electric are like, you buy the product, and it gets sent down the transmission pipeline by whoever owns the lines, no matter what aggregation company you purchase from.
Click to expand...

Curious to see how that would work. Companies are granted a monopoly because they invest capital into building the infrastructure and getting internet/tv/phone to Middleofnowhereville. If they had to share their lines with mom and pop company right after such a huge investment, they probably would never even consider wiring up sparsely populated areas. I'm not sure how long these monopolies last for, if they expire at all, but there should be some kind of period for a company to break even and make profit on their investment before making it available for others to use, sort of like patents.

As for densely populated areas.....Google needs to haul ass with skynet here in NYC so I can enjoy me some super fast intarwebs.
 
This argument has been going on for over a decade, and i'm sick of people putting "population density" into the argument. A LOT of stuff that contributes a shitload to our internet is out of major cities like Chicago, New York, Dallas, etc... Even though those major internet hubs have terabits of connectivity, the most a residence downtown in one of those areas can get is a measly 50-100 down and 5-10 up unless you are lucky enough to get an upstart like these guys in your town http://www.paxio.com/Residentialinternet . Don't give me this population density shit, it's corporate greed with the help of State and federal lobbyist keeping our internet speeds down. The only place this argument holds any weight is on the farm lands of the US where most don't have or want internet anyways.
 
demingo said:
While that maybe somewhat true, it still doesn't explain why major US cities have horrid broadband even with massive population densities.
Click to expand...

Because in a lot of US cities those people are poor. With that said they'd probably spend their money on broadband instead of stuff they really need.
 
a monopoly leads to "good enough" rather than excellence. Take a look at the high prices and slow service. What is the incentive to do anything better? They are already raking in the cash, and its not like you can switch to dialup. Your options are going to be cable, dsl, maybe wi-max and 3G/4G. The only innovation recently has been with the wireless providers, although to be honest some cable companies are ramping up to 24 Mbs service or more. DSL is dead but not quite buried. The current technology is not capable of being upgraded to anything like what cable can do.
 
I see progress every day. It seems if I drive around aimlessly I can see new fiber going in almost every day in a different location. AT&T is making a big push in my area with u-verse and that requires lots of fiber.
 
I read somewhere that after the Korean war, they had the chance to start from scratch basically so got to lay fiber cable everywhere. So when the internet rolled on in they have always been able to use it to the fullest while lots of the U.S. is still on copper wires and small fiber lines.

Course our major companies should stop trying to make billion dollar profits and fix that.
 
I'd also like to point out that a lot of these technologies were developed in stages here. We had to go from A to B to C as a result of technology changes over time. A lot of the developing nations get to go from nothing directly to C because there is no prior infrastructure. Examples are of places in India where they have no phone service but they have cell phones.
 
Interesting discussion.

Up until the middle of last year, I was paying $45/mo for 5mbs [down] / 0.4mbs [up]. I discovered several days ago that they increased my speed to 10mbs/1mbs.

The cable company is Charter Communications and they really blow!

The problem - at least in my area - is that we have PUC's (Public Utility Commission) which take bids from cable/phone service providers and allow the winning bidder to control that area for X number of years.

When I moved to this area 6+ years ago, I was in an area that had Time Warner. There was rarely a problem and we even had On-Demand, which I loved. Now, over 6 years later, this sucky service from Charter Communications still doesn't have On-Demand... I was talking with one of their techs the other day - while he came about yet another "glitch" in their service. He said the reason why we still don't have On-Demand is that their network in this area is overloaded and they won't invest in the infrastructure!
I've already signed up to DirecTV and I'm very much looking forward to telling Charter to stick their cable boxes where the sun doesn't shine.
 
I lived in Korea for awhile last year, they are obsessed with computer games there. In some places there's a PC Bang in literally every other building. I'm sure that interest plays at least some part in it, but definitely not all. Cell phones are equally kick ass there. The entire subway system has 3g coverage, even underground. Little grannies watching the news on their cell phones on the way home from work. How often do you see that here?
 
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