Spectrum of Greed

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing! It is just what we asked for.

An amazing post on the history of South Korea’s internet has been all but unobserved by most of the internet community in the US.  This information should be part of the body of knowledge that is reviewed as a part of defining a strategic plan to get us where we need to be as a country for internet access.  Based on current projections, we are already 13 years behind South Korea, as their first generation plan to get their country online was originally conceived and execution begun back in 1995.  Fast forward to today, and they are already on Internet - generation II, while the US still sits on it’s thumbs, hoping that somehow if we keep doing what we have been doing that everything will be better.  The problem is a fundamental one:  Korea has a target of connecting their citizens to the world, and to be number one at it.  The US has a goal as well:  to provide support to existing companies that have built our internet infrastructure and hope that they do what is necessary to connect the citizens of the US.  The one complicating factor is that the companies in control of this roadmap in the US have a different motivation than getting the best connectivity for all citizens - it is called making a profit.

An excerpt from the article:

How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.

As of today, South Korea - just South, mind you, is planning to spend 34.1 Trillion Korean Won to take their wireless internet up to 1Gigabit down, and 10Mbit up, a recent article from Telecom Paper suggests.  Of course, after going out and finding that the value of the Won to the dollar is, shall we say, fractional, it does change the perspective a bit.  In fact, the exact exchange rate as of 2/10/09 is

1 South Korean won = 0.000728 U.S. dollars

That is pretty lame - in fact, I would have to put in just shy of 70 Won to get 6 minutes on my neighborhood parking meter (that is a plug nickel in US currency).  But even with that ludicrous conversion rate, the amount they plan to juice their wireless system by equates to a  $24,726,286,481.53 in US Dollars.  Of course, that is $24.7 Billion just on their wireless infrastructure.  In the US, we are anticipating a paltry 6 to 8 Billion for ALL broadband in our economic stimulus plan the last time I checked.

Many would argue that the US should not invest, but leave that to the companies they have leased the spectrum to to build things out.  A large percentage of the small amount being allocated to broadband is doing that in the form of build out support to existing providers.  Based on current behavior however, I think someone other than the existing few players in the space need to be brought in.  this quote from a recent PC Magazine article highlights how companies that want to provide wireless access are sidelined and marginalized, yet are still providing a critical function in our current broadband infrastructure that the major players simply ignore because it isn’t profitable enough.

In terms of the number of WISP customers nationally, Schafer believes there could be upward of three million users, though getting concrete data is a challenge. There are approximately 100 WISPs filed with the FCC, for example. Matt Larsen, owner of Vistabeam in Gering, Nebraska, says the WISP opportunity has come from a lack of respect, particularly for rural customers. “There’s this idea floating around that rural communities aren’t technologically savvy,” he says. “They are. They just lack the connectivity. I have an access point that sits in the middle of a cow pasture for a town of 100 homes. Eighty of those homes are getting broadband. Does that sound like a place that doesn’t care about technology?”

If we want to get radically different results in connecting our citizens to the internet, we need to make radical changes to how we approach solving the problem.  This necessitates getting new thinking and new methodologies introduced into the process, not more of the same or incremental change brought about by existing players.  Let’s make a real committment to getting all our citizens connected and putting some of this crisis money where it will really do us the most good.  The rest of the world is taking this seriously - it is about time that we did too.