Intel to Invest $20 million in Korean WiBRO Venture

As reported by Reuters and other media outlets, Intel will invest $20 million in a wireless broadband joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Korea Telecom, and Korea's National Pension Service.  The joint venture was announced last May by KT, with capital of $280.9 million.   It will expand South Korea's mobile WiMax coverage to 82 cities by March of next year, covering 85 percent of the nation's population.
The expansion is part of KT's effort to cope with surging data traffic following introduction of Apple's iPhone in late November of last year.

Google's Transparency Report and Government Requests From Korea

I noticed a bump up in traffic to this blog over the past few days and then found that R. Elgin had called this a "neat blog" in a post over at The Marmot's Hole.   Thank you for that!   In the same post he noted a Joongang Ilbo report about the Korean government's requests for information from Google.  I'd seen the same article and this prompted me to look more closely at Google's transparency report.

During the first half of 2010, according to Google's data, the Korean government requested the removal of web content 38 times, involving a total of 8,549 items.  The Google report indicates that 100 percent of the removal requests were "fully or partially complied with."  As reported in The Korea Times, the number of removal requests was the largest in Asia and the sixth highest worldwide.

Why so many removal requests from the Korean government?  The vast majority of such requests, according to Google Korea, are for removal of URLs that contain personal information in the form of Korean resident registration numbers (RRNs), which contain date of birth, gender, registration region, and registration order.

The Korea Times article also noted that Google's transparency report did not disclose similar data for China because, according to Google "Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time."  

The Rapid Diffusion of Smartphones in Korea

The Joongang Daily carried two articles today that underscore important aspects of the transformation taking place in mobile communication, here in Korea as well as globally.  The first article noted that the recent Chuseok holiday led to a surge in the downloading of smartphone applications. Applications for road navigation, expressway traffic congestion and charye, the Korean ancestor veneration ritual, topped the popular application list during the holiday period. The same article noted that smartphone users in Korea currently number three million, a figure that is expected to double by year's end. I expect that may be a conservative estimate. Just think of how many family members and relatives had a chance to see the iPhone or Android phones in operation over the Chuseok holiday! That sort of exposure probably represents the most powerful form of sales promotion for these devices here in Korea.
A second article described the parts bottleneck that is being faced by the manufacturers of smart phones. As shown in the accompanying graphic (click to see a larger version), industry forecasts in the spring of 2009 significantly underestimated the worldwide growth of demand for smart phones.  Consequently, such parts as the organic light emitting diode (OLED) screens are in short supply.  The manufacturing process for such parts bears many similarities to that for semiconductors and requires long lead times to build fabs and ensure adequate capacity.

Korea's Mobile Broadband Revolution: Some Market Projections

Pyramid Research recently came out with a report that includes projections for South Korea's communications market revenue through 2015.   The accompanying bar chart (click on the graphic to see a larger version) summarizes their projections.  Not surprisingly, fixed voice service is projected to decrease, while fixed VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, as in Skype) is projected to increase significantly by 2015.  Mobile data, the green portion of each bar, is projected to show the greatest increase through 2015.  This segment of the market essentially refers to mobile use of the internet via Apple's iPhone, Android handsets and other devices.  Of course, it include mobile use of Skype, which should come naturally to those who already use it as a fixed VOIP service on their computers at the office, in the home or elsewhere.
The main trend represented in the graphic included here is that broadband internet is going mobile!  I would be surprised if mobile data services don't grow even more than Pyramid predicts.

Net Neutrality: The View From Korea

More than two years ago I wrote a post for this blog on the topic of "Net Neutrality and Conceptions of Cyberspace."  You'll forgive me for not following all of the twists and turns of that debate in the United States, including failed efforts by the F.C.C., court rulings and the joint statement on net neutrality by Google and Verizon.  You see, living in Seoul, one might as well be on another planet when it comes to debating net neutrality.  Consider the following:

1. As I noted in my earlier post, something approximating net neutrality was part of South Korea's efforts to build a modern telephone network, starting in 1980.  The experience here with a massive telephone service backlog and the social divisions it exacerbated made the goal of universal, equal service for all Korean citizens a non-debatable issue.   From the beginning, Korea set out to build an "information welfare society" (정보복지사회) in which services and the tolls charged for them would be the same for residents of farming and fishing villages as for the residents of Seoul.
2. Korea never let up on its commitment to building and improving network infrastructure.  When U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke about the importance of "information superhighways" in a 1994 speech at UCLA, the Korean government picked up on that terminology and implemented the Korea Information Infrastructure project in 1995, which gave it some of the world's most advanced fixed broadband networks in the world within a decade.  Also in the 1990s Korea became the first nation in the world to commercialize CDMA for mobile telephony, giving consumers here the potential to access broadband internet while on the move.
3. As readers of this blog will know, actual use of mobile data services in South Korea remained very low (around 10 percent of mobile phone subscribers) until the arrival of Apple's iPhone in late 2009 and the shock it created.  Unlike the U.S. where AT&T's networks at first could not handle the data traffic generated by iPhone users, Korea had mobile networks in place with plenty of excess capacity and the big debate here in 2008 and 2009 was about how to increase consumer's use of mobile broadband services!
4. Korean citizens today not only enjoy uniform rates for roughly equivalent services nationwide, but they also have developed some of the world’s highest standards for service. Most installation of telephone, broadband internet or other communication service is done on a same day basis.If problems arise with consumer electronics products, after-service (AS) is very efficient.  In response to high consumer expectations for after-service, Apple has had to revise and upgrade its AS policies here.
5. In short, from the vantage point of someone living in South Korea, the net neutrality debate that is so heated these days in the United States seems misdirected.  If the U.S. had, like Korea, made a long term and consistent commitment to building information and communication infrastructure, along with citizen awareness of how to use these resources, the situation might be entirely different. Indeed, the general direction of ICT technology continues to be toward greater computing and communications capacity at lower costs. This basic trend, as expressed in Moore's Law, is at the heart of the information revolution. Consequently, the longer term prospect all over the world, is for an information culture in which information flows freely and abundantly, without restriction for lack of vision, commercial greed or whatever other reasons might be given.

I'd like to challenge readers to point out what, if anything, is wrong with this picture.   Enjoy.