I just read, that in South Korea 70% of the households have broadband access. And not just meager 256kbps or 512kbps as is typical here, there the typical connection is 2mbps. Wow! And I thought I live in a relatively well wired country...
As this older article about South Korea's new president implies, the impact of the net in politics and society is huge and probably a very interesting preview to what we can expect here in the future. If I just extrapolate what always-on changed for me to a whole society...!
Unfortunately I don't speak Korean so I can't check for myself. It would be very interesting to find out how the whole media industry and the style of marketing adopted to the web there (the article gives a few hints, but how does advertising spending figures changed, what about the contents). How much more connected are the people to each other there, did the average Korean expand his (virtual) personal network in different verticals like is often suggested? How distributed is the traffic on the sites (are there a few winners, which more of less are the Korean web, are there many smaller sites or is even micro publishing becoming an important factor?)? 2mbps offers a much better average online video streaming experience than we know here, what does it imply? Many more questions come to mind.
Posted by seefeld at June 10, 2003 17:24