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.

Speed Matters: The U.S. Lags in Internet Download Speed

It is not only in Olympic swimming events or track that speed is important.  The new 2008 report, "Speed Matters," a project of the Communication Workers of America, quantifies just how much the United States lags behind other nations in the speed of its broadband internet infrastructure.  The full report is available for download at the organization's website, http://www.speedmatters.org/ This second annual survey of internet speeds in each of the fifty states shows, not surprisingly, that the United States continues to lag behind other countries in the world.  The median download speed for the nation was 2.3 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 63 mbps, or 30 times faster than the U.S. The U.S. also trails South Korea at 49 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, France at 17 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps.

The median upload speed from the speedmatters.org test was just 435 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or to transmit large files such as medical records.  The report also notes that about 15 percent of Americans still connect to the internet via a dial-up connection, something that has been virtually nonexistent for years now in South Korea.   It is worth noting that the debate over the importance of high speed, broadband internet was concluded years ago in South Korea.  People here are already enjoying many of the benefits that high speed internet connections bring and, if anything, the Korean populace seems to look forward to even higher speeds in the near future.

Korea Ranks Number One in Fourth Annual "Speed Matters" Survey

The Communications Workers of America has released its fourth annual "Speed Matters" survey of broadband internet speed in the United States.  As shown in the accompanying graphic (click to see a full size version) their report benchmarks several other countries around the world, including South Korea.  The new report argues that speed matters because 1) speed makes the promise of the internet a reality, 2) U.S. economic growth depends on high speed internet, 3) millions of Americans don't have high speed internet, and 4) the U.S. trails far behind other countries.  According to this latest report, the United States ranks fifteenth among the countries of the world in average broadband internet speed.

More on Korea's speedy digital networks

As a quick perusal of prior posts on this blog will show (you can read them at this link), I've long been concerned with the speed of digital networks in general and how fast Korea's networks are in comparison with other countries around the world.  Given the multiple organizations that measure internet speed and the many different methods they use, placing Korea in context compared with other countries can sometimes be very confusing.   The purpose of this post is not to solve that problem, but rather to call attention to OpenSignal,  a relatively new (founded in 2010) company that specializes in mapping wireless coverage and speeds.   One strength of their measure is that it comes from users of their app all around the world and therefore reflects internet download speeds in actual usage situations.

Open Signal as shown in the world map above and the bar chart at the left, measures "overall speed," which is a combined measure of speed versus availability of 3G and LTE mobile services. (click on the graphics to see a full size version.  Open Signal defines ".. overall speed as the average mobile data connection a user experiences based on both the speeds and availability of a country’s 3G and 4G networks. Overall speed measurements vary considerably from country to country depending on their particular stage of 3G and 4G development. For instance a country with fast LTE speeds but low 4G availability might have a much lower overall speed than a country with moderate LTE speeds but a very high level of 4G availability."  Obviously, South Korea's world leadership in LTE introduction and current penetration (availability) boosts its standing on this measure, relative to Singapore and a few other countries that have fast speeds, but lag behind Korea in availability.

Another was of effectively visualizing this is to see where Korea fits in the chart showing speed versus availability.  Click on the final graphic to see a full-size version of the screen capture.  Better yet, go to the online Open Signal report and see data for each of the countries in the chart by hovering over the dots.

Perspectives on speed and LTE in Korea

As regular, even semi-regular, readers of this blog know, I've long been interested in the world-leading status and steadily increasing speed of South Korea's digital networks. Koreans themselves seldom question the need for ever faster networks, the significance of which seems to be second nature to most citizens in this country, who are justifiably proud of their nation's status as an "IT powerhouse."
Technically, the speed of digital networks relates to such matters as the processing speed of semiconductors in the routers that connect the network and the bandwidth of both mobile and fixed networks.  There are a number of ways too look at and measure internet speed.   For a number of years now, Akamai's regular "State of the Internet" reports have shown that South Korea has the highest average internet download speed in the world.  In the latest such report, for the fourth quarter of 2012, South Korea continued its lead, with an average download speec of 14.0 Mbps, ahead of Japan with an average of 10.8 Mbps, and Hong Kong, which ranged third at 9.3 Mbps.

Another indication of speed is the extremely rapid adoption of LTE in South Korea, as shown in the accompanying graphic by Telegeography (click on the graphic to see a full-size version.  Korea's three mobile service providers have all built nationwide LTE networks and have introduced service at a rate faster than any other country in the world.  This has even led to some criticism that the adoption of LTE in Korea has been too fast, possibly cutting into profits that could have been earned from 3G services.
Various measures can be used to represent trends in the adoption and use of new mobile communication technologies, including the number of subscribers, the number of users per 100 population and so forth.   For this post, I've assembled a graphic from the latest report on mobile data traffic trends published by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (Korean language).  This graphic illustrates the dramatic increase in actual use of data (content) by Korean consumers (click on the graphic to see a full-size version).  As such, it shows that the generation of Korean language content and services seems to be keeping pace with which consumers are acquiring new LTE smartphones.
Note several features of this graph.  First, adoption of Korea's homegrown WiBro (mobile WiMax) 4G technology has remained relatively stable since January of 2012.  Second, levels of 2G usage are so small that the data does not even appear in this graphic.  For all practical purposes, 2G has been discontinued in South Korea.  Third, there is a slow but steady decline in use of 3G mobile devices for data transmission.   Finally, of
course, the dramatic growth of LTE is shown in the green shaded portion of the graphic.

OpenSignal report and Korea's lead in network speed

As readers of this blog will know, the speed of digital data processing and transmission was one of my recurrent concerns in earlier posts (see these for example).  A new (February 2019) report by OpenSignal confirms that Korea's 4G mobile networks are still the world's fastest.   The report makes interesting reading.  One of its main findings is that 4G speeds around the world "...vary tremendously across the day, showing the impact of congestion on daytime speeds."   (click on the graphic for a full size version)

The OpenSignal report indicated that Korea ranked number one in the world in average download speed, but it broke this down into 4G speed at the slowest hour of the day compared with speed at the fastest hour of the day.  Part of the graphic is shown at left.  Currently, 4G users around the world experience a wide range of download speeds between the slowest and fastest hours of the day.  Furthermore, cities see the greatest speed swings, indicating daytime congestion that might be relieved by 5G.  As noted in the report, "Users in Paris experienced the greatest range of 4G Download Speeds, fluctuating between 21.5 Mbps and 51.4 Mbps in a 24-hour period, followed by Sydney and Santiago. Worryingly, New York's fastest hour for 4G speed of 40.8 Mbps was in a virtual dead heat with the 40.6 Mbps Seoul’s inhabitants experience at their slowest hour of the day. But Seoul’s slowest hour of day is still faster than the fastest hour of day in Taipei (38.2 Mbps), London (38.3 Mbps) and 21 other cities analyzed." (My emphasis added in the quote)

Slow Light to Speed up the Internet?

I hadn't planned another post on the importance of speed for the internet, but ran across a fascinating article from the BBC (click here to read the full article).  Researchers in Britain and the United States say that a huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down.  The major limiting factor on the internet's speed comes about not from transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations. Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast web speeds. As noted by Dr. Chris Stevens from the department of engineering sciences at the University of Oxford,  the current system ". . . limits the speed of the whole process to the speed of your electronics.  The light and the fibres can quite cheerfully sustain a couple of terahertz, but your electronics can't do more than a few gigahertz."  Using metamaterials to build a completely optical internet may help to get around this problem.  

Korea's continuing lead in speed

I received a message this past week calling my attention to the infographic at the left  (click on the infographic to see a full size version, or go directly to it at this link)  Note that the comparisons of South Korea with the U.S. are on the top quarter or so of the graphic, followed by U.S.-specific information.
This information prompted me to check Akamai's latest State of the Internet quarterly report, for the third quarter of 2012.   It shows that Korea continues to lead the world in its average measured connection speed to the internet, at 14.7 Mbps, followed by Japan and Hong Kong at 10.5 and 9.0 Mbps respectively.  South Korea is also the world leader in what Akamai calls "High Broadband"  with 52% of all connections at a speed greater than 10 Mbps, compared with only 18% of such connections in the United States.
When it comes to internet connections, whether fixed or mobile, speed matters.  However, high speed broadband networks do not simply appear overnight.  Indeed, the building of these new networks is a large, long-term construction project that requires massive funding, planning and leadership.  The larger lesson from this infographic, along with considerable recent research and discussion in policy circles, is that the liberal, U.S. approach to broadband, "let the market and private sector handle it" doesn't seem to work well, when compared with the government-led, long-term ICT policy planning in South Korea.
I've been working over the past several weeks on revision of a conference paper with a Korean colleague that examines the role of government leadership in the ICT sector, so this infographic was a timely reminder that policies and plans, or the lack thereof, ultimately affect the marketplace and consumers.   It also reminded me to appreciate the gigabit network at KAIST and the high download speeds we enjoy here in the Daedok Innopolis.   While Kansas City, Austin Texas and Provo Utah will soon get similar speeds courtesy of Google, over here in South Korea the entire nation will very soon be enjoying a gigabit network.