North Korea's Moment for Mobile?

• The announcement last month by Egypt's Orascom Telecom that it had won a 3G license to construct mobile phone networks in North Korea bears close scrutiny. According to press reports, the company's subsidiary CHEO Technology, a joint venture 75 per cent owned by Orascom and 25 per cent owned by North Korea’s state-run Korea Post and Telecommunications, won the right to provide mobile phone services using 3G technology. This announcement was tantalizing news, for several key reasons.
• First among them is the recent history of North Korea's involvement with mobile communications. When China began building cell-phone relay stations along the North Korean border in 2003, the use of mobile phones with pre-paid cards became a hot black market item in North Korea. Defectors from North Korea have widely reported the use of cell phones to communicate with their families. The response of the North Korean government was an attempt to ban the use of mobile phones, including increased patrols using devices that detect cell-phone signals. Yet, in early 2005 Rebecca MacKinnon speculated in Yale Global Online that cell phone technology was poised to "re-shape the North Korean world view - seen through the Chinese peephole." In 2008, it remains "poised." To date, the North Korean government has shown its fear, politically speaking, of the free flow of information that cellular technology affords.
• A second reason for interest in Orascom's announcement is that it includes plans to invest more than $400 million in infrastructure over the next three years, providing mobile phone service to North Koreans in all of their major cities. Should this happen, it will be a start toward erasing the world's most egregious digital divide, that between North and South Korea. Such a step is long overdue. However, such modern infrastructure comes with a price, that the leadership of North Korea must certainly understand. Any modern communications, network, particularly if it brings access to the internet, will also aid those who seek democratization.
• Finally, this announcement raises some interesting questions about China's influence on the modernization of North Korea's communications networks, versus the influence of South Korea. I think there is little question that the Korean language will be dominant within North Korean communications for some time to come. However, it finds itself today sandwiched between China and a lively South Korean democracy in which information flows freely through advanced networks and whose major coporations operate globally. To eventually reunify with the South Korea of "ubiquitous networks," it seems that the North will need to veer away from China's policy of attempting to control the internet toward the manner in which the South has embraced it.

Conceptions of Cyberspace and Korea's Vision

As the world moves more fully into the information age, Korea promises to be an important contributor to the shaping of that new environment. One of my goals for this blog and my wordpress blog on Korean telecommunications is to outline Korean ideas about cyberspace and to suggest where they fit in the global scheme of things. In order to consider the internet as a whole and the global picture, the work of Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig over the past decade is essential background. A good starting point for any serious student of these matters would be to download and read each of his books. (from http://www.lessig.org/ ) In making these books available for personal use with a simple pdf file download, Professor Lessig is leading the Creative Commons effort by example, and what a fine example it is!

Speed on the Internet: Its Dimensions and Significance

We talk rather frequently these days about the "speed" of our internet connections. Those in the know understand that speed also equals "bandwidth." Therefore, "broadband internet" is better than the narrower bandwidths that preceded it. Speed has several meanings and connotations when applied to the internet.

• One important meaning is the length of time from when you touch a keyboard button on a PC, mobile phone or PDA, until the device displays your input. For users of the internet, this meaning of speed is very important, and it helps to explain why, once someone has gotten accustomed to fast, broadband internet connections, they're unwilling to go back to slower interaction with the web.

• Another meaning of speed has to do with bandwidth and how much data can be transmitted per second or other unit of time via different networks. In other words, I can say that I'm connected to the web at 54 Mbps or 100 Mbps. The vast majority of non-technically-inclined people in today's world probably tune out such explanations as irrelevant to their own, day-to-day concerns.

• In practical, human terms, yet another meaning of speed is how quickly a video segment will load and play on your computer, mobile phone, pda or other device. As with the response to keyboard input, the goal here is instantaneous response.

• In today's world, another way of thinking about speed is in relation to politics. Universal access to speedy networks equals the possibility for democratic politics and the chance for an information society in which everyone prospers. I'm not suggesting that content and other factors are irrelevant, but equal access to information and equal capability to disseminate information seem to demand speed on the internet and through the world's networks.

• Speed and virtual reality (aka Cyberspace). It is also the speed, or bandwidth of internet connections that makes possible Cyworld in Korea, Second Life in the U.S. and other world's of virtual reality. Do these worlds have a history, like the real world? If so, how is the history different from and related to the history of the real world we inhabit? Most importantly, how fast is the history evolving? Is it accelerating?

In the final analysis, there can be no doubt that speed is important. The reason I emphasize this point is that some people in the United States, Britain and other countries are still questioning strategy for building-out broadband internet networks that will allow all citizens to access information with blazing speed. Speed matters. It matters a lot. P.S. I'm enjoying the speed access to the internet that living in South Korea affords me! More on this topic in future posts.

Google Launches Korean-Style Web Search

Google has just announced that it will reshape its Web search engine service into a categorized, graphic-rich style that serves the Korean users' taste. This reinforces the basic point made in my earlier post on how language and culture place bounds on web-surfing in South Korea. In redesigning its Korean-language search services, Google is going to attempt to satisfy the preferences of Korean "netizens." I recommend they go all the way and try to introduce features that will provide Korean-language surfers with the information they are searching for. One of the most popular features on Naver is "Knowledge In," where netizens ask questions that are answered by other Korean web surfers. This service has a heavy social-networking, as well as search compontent. But to be clear about the limits, it is Koreans asking other Koreans for answers. This is a very different sort of question than asking Google to search (or more accurately "crawl" ) the entire internet for mentions of a topic. In other news, there are reports that Naver is introducing services to make its "search" of the web appear more comprehensive, like Google's. The development of these two contrasting services and Naver versus Google market share will be most interesting to follow here in Korea.

The ITU's Digital Opportunity Index--Korea Ranks Number One in the World

For the past several years, South Korea has ranked number one in the world on the ITU's Digital Opportunity Index (DOI). For that reason alone it is worth understanding what this index is and what it measures. The index is based on 11 ICT indicators, grouped in 3 clusters: opportunity, infrastructure and utilization, as illustrated in the accompanying graphic (click the graphic for larger version).

Moreover, the DOI is an outgrowth of the World Summit on the Information Society meetings organized by the ITU. Among the dominant concerns at these meetings was the digital divide and the degree to which developing as well as developed nations could achieve digital opportunity. In the Geneva phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, participants decided that, in an ideal world, digital opportunity would mean:

• The whole population having easy access to ICTs at affordable prices;
• All homes equipped with ICT devices;
• All citizens having mobile ICT devices; and
• Everyone using broadband.

As one can see from a glance at the world map, digital opportunity currently varies greatly from country to country and regionally. A couple of points deserve to be emphasized about South Korea's world-leading ranking on the DOI index. First, the index contains a strong measure of infrastructure. The presence and pervasiveness of an infrastructure, or we might say the ubiquity of a network, is a necessary precondition for the equitable flow of information among all citizens in an information society. Second, the "opportunity" which concerns the ITU is opportunity for all citizens, to access information, not simply the question of whether the new networks contribute to economic growth. Third, this index does not incorporate measures of literacy and education, but the inclusion of such data would in all likelihood bolster South Korea's standing. Fourth and finally, one would hope that somehow an index like DOI could be related to the language in which information is accessed, processed and used. The incoming administration in Seoul argues that English has become the lingua franca and therefore Korea needs to mount a major effort to improve English ability precisely in order to improve productivity. If 90 percent of the information on the internet today is in English, is fluency in that language a pre-requisite to true digital opportunity?