Although the English needs a little work, Korean broadband delivers a reality most Americans can only imagine.

South Korea has launched a nationwide broadband upgrade to rid themselves of 100Mbps service for $38 a month, claiming those speeds and prices are no longer sufficient for Korea’s new digital economy.

By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second and slash the monthly price to just $27 a month.

That’s more than 200 times faster than speeds enjoyed by most Americans, who pay an average of $46 a month — nearly double Korea’s planned price. Even more galling for Canadians — those speeds and prices are for completely unlimited access.

Stop the Cap! reader John in Victoria, B.C., thinks South Korea’s broadband improvements call out just how ludicrous Canada’s Internet Overcharging schemes really are.

“If the Canadian Radio-TV and Telecommunications Commission ultimately allows $2 per gigabyte in overlimit fees, we would have to pay $5,184,000 per month for the same thing,” John says. “If this comparison doesn’t make people want to chuck the CRTC, what will?”

For the government of South Korea, which is spearheading the Internet expansion effort, broadband has become a national priority for the fast-growing Korean economy.

[flv width=”640″ height=”447″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Hello CJ TV.flv[/flv]

Korea’s CJ HelloVision cable system delivers TV programming, broadband, and phone service at speeds and prices that make North American providers look ridiculous.  Bonus: That sure looks like Sarah Palin making a cameo appearance in this animated video.  (1 minute)

South Korea historically trailed Japan’s economic post-World War II revival for decades, but no more. The country, which used to be poorer than the Communist People’s Republic of Korea to the north, has grown to the world’s 13th largest economic power, and has designs on being a world leader in the transition to the digital/information economy. They are already ahead of North America, with an advanced broadband platform that can sustain concepts like cloud computing that are just getting off the ground in Canada and the USA.

The KCC is spearheading Korea's broadband advancements

Only the most rural parts of Korea still rely on copper phone wires delivering DSL service, now considered archaic. Most of the country is now wired for fiber optics, making a transition from 100Mbps-1Gbps relatively simple. With new laser technology, existing fiber cables can transmit faster speeds, and when fiber is laid in the country, extra strands are buried for future use. The costs of burying 10 or 100 or 1,000 strands come mostly from labor, not the wiring.

Private electronics companies are strong proponents of the infrastructure upgrades, and service providers are on board to deliver the service. That is in marked contrast with providers in the United States and Canada who consider expensive upgrades an unnecessary proposition.

“Providers in the USA and Canada defend their existing networks as ‘good enough for average residential use,’ something that would be laughed away here in Korea or in Japan,” Dr. Park Sung-Jin, a Korean broadband researcher who travels between Seoul and Los Angeles tells Stop the Cap! “Large providers like AT&T cannot afford to lose their propaganda arguments of broadband sufficiency because if they did, they would lose face and be forced to transform broadband in the USA at the expense of their enormous profits.”

“In Asia, we would never allow our providers to dictate the national broadband policies of the country, and our discussions are long past arguing over what speeds are correct,” Park says.  “Now we’re arguing about how to bring the cost down.”

Japan delivers 1Gbps broadband service for $70 a month, a price scoffed at by Choi Gwang-gi, the 28-year old Korean now in charge of the Korea’s expansive broadband plans.

“I can’t imagine anyone in Korea paying that much,” Choi told the New York Times. “No, no, that’s unthinkable.”

A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is underway with 5,000 households in five South Korean cities. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.

“A lot of Koreans are early adopters,” Mr. Choi said, “and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3-D TV, Internet protocol TV, high-definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra-high-definition TV, cloud computing.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/200Mbps Broadband.flv[/flv]

Hello Broadband delivers a silly advertisement for its soon to be obsolete 200Mbps broadband service.  (1 minute)

Meanwhile, according to Dr. Park, North American providers like Bell, Rogers, and Comcast are spending millions trying to convince lawmakers in both countries that such speeds are wholly unnecessary.

“The United States and Canada are the worst, with providers spending countless millions themselves and through their lackey trade associations and illicit ‘consumer groups’ working for them trying to convince lawmakers American broadband isn’t so bad after all, but it is,” Park says. “They routinely claim any country that is ahead of the U.S. or Canada is a ‘special case’ because of urban density or government subsidies, but that can’t explain away all of the disparity in speeds and accessibility, only money and monopoly profits can.”

Both Romania and Latvia now beat Canada and the USA in broadband speeds and pricing, and North America’s dominance in a digital economy could be at risk.

Closer to home Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif., told the Times Korea is on the right track.

“The gigabit Internet is essential for the future, absolutely essential, and all the technologists will tell you this,” said Norman. “We’re all going to be doing cloud computing, for example, and that won’t work if you’re not always connected. Games. Videoconferencing. Video on demand. All this will require huge bandwidth, huge speed.”

In Canada, such predictions have given companies like Bell an excuse to engage in a national Internet Overcharging scheme they claim will help pay for building these kinds of future networks. But other countries around the world now deliver speeds Canada only promises their citizens, without overcharging them to pay for it.

“Charging for broadband traffic would be like you or I charging for the wind — it has no real value except in the eyes of the people who stand to profit from it,” Park said.

Will people notice a difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps? Koreans say they will, according to the New York Times.

One of the customers already connected to Mr. Choi’s pilot program is Moon Ki-soo, 42, an Internet consultant. He got a gigabit hookup about a year ago through CJ Hellovision, although because of the internal wiring of his apartment building his actual connection speed clocks in at 278 megabits a second.

But even that speed — about a quarter-gigabit — has him dazzled.

“It is so much more convenient to watch movies and drama shows now,” he told the newspaper.

[flv width=”368″ height=”228″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Giga Internet.flv[/flv]

This Korean language promotional video for Giga Internet, the marketing brand for 1Gbps broadband, still dazzles the imagination for those who lack the ability to follow the words.  As you watch, consider how America’s typical DSL service provider leaves millions of Americans with a ‘covered wagon’ 3Mbps broadband solution.  (6 minutes)

[flv width=”480″ height=”340″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/SK Broadband.mp4[/flv]

A stylish ad for SK Broadband, declaring new high speeds will let users “See the Unseen.”  (1 minute)

The same judge responsible for cutting the legs out from under FilmOn has ruled ivi must cease retransmitting network affiliate stations that make up the bulk of its service.

In a widely-expected ruling, the Hon. Naomi Rice Buchwald, U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York proved to be a sympathetic judge to the interests of America’s largest broadcasting companies by mirroring an earlier decision blocking virtual online cable systems from retransmitting broadcast television programming online.

According to the court’s ruling, ivi doesn’t qualify as a cable system because, in part, it’s too new of a concept.  Buchwald ruled that the definition of a cable system was written in 1976, before the Internet was around to redefine it.  Under the Copyright Act, any cable system can rebroadcast TV signals so long as they pay copyright fees.  This “compulsory license” gives cable systems the right to carry broadcast stations, but only to cable operations subject to oversight by the Federal Communications Commission.

But since the FCC does not regulate Internet video, ivi doesn’t qualify for this provision of the Act, according to Judge Buchwald.

“First, a service providing Internet retransmissions cannot qualify as a cable system,” the ruling said. “Second, the compulsory license for cable systems is intended for localized retransmission services, and cannot be utilized by a service which retransmits broadcast signals nationwide. Third, the rules and regulations of the FCC, even if found not to be binding on a service such as ivi, are integral to the statutory licensing scheme established in 1976.”

Buchwald issued a similar ruling against FilmOn, another virtual online cable system.  Broadcasters sought the same venue to hear their latest case against ivi in hopes the judge would rule similarly, and she did.

As a result, ivi closed down its streaming service this morning pending a planned appeal:

Ivi issued this statement this morning on their website.

Mossberg

Walt Mossberg, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, delivered some stinging remarks about how large telecom and media companies deliver broadband services and programming to North Americans.

“We really suck at broadband,” Mossberg complained during opening remarks at Beet.TV’s first executive summit held at the Embassy of Finland in Washington.  “We have terrible, terrible broadband.”

“The typical consumer either has been lured into broadband by a DSL service that in Finland would not count as broadband — 768kbps is not broadband,” Mossberg said.  “If [the government] adopted a regulation not allowing Verizon to call that crap broadband, it would help.”

Mossberg added that cable modem service in the US and Canada is so slow, it is the object of pity and pathos in countries like Japan and Korea, and we’re overcharged for it.

[flv width=”480″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon Should Stop Calling DSL Broadband 2-17-11.flv[/flv]

Mossberg’s comments come as part of a discussion about the online video revolution, which he says is being hampered by copyright controls, outdated advertising models, and broadband providers delivering sub-standard service.  (8 minutes)

Consumers across North Carolina can celebrate their successful effort to protest legislation that would effectively ban community-owned broadband networks in the state.

Thanks to an outpouring of phone calls and e-mails this afternoon, legislators have been forced to delay placing the controversial legislation on the agenda for tomorrow’s planned meeting.  Our sources tell us the reason for the delay was “all of the unwanted attention” the bill was getting from outraged citizenry.

But victory may be short-lived.  The proposed legislation has been re-inserted on the agenda for a meeting to be held next Wednesday.  That means one more week for you to keep the pressure on.

Use this time to tell your friends and family to contact legislators and let them know in no uncertain terms this bill needs to be killed for good right now.  One week, one month, or one year — there is no good time for this kind of corporate welfare to become law in a state that has a long way to go to achieve top-rated broadband service.  North Carolina’s economy depends on robust, world-class broadband.

The state’s phone and cable companies are spending their money on lobbyists to defeat competition, not bring the kind of service communities in Wilson and Salisbury now enjoy.

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration in Wisconsin is under fire today for being allegedly caught blocking access to a website popular with protesters fighting the governor’s position on public unions.

Democratic party officials said that the website, www.defendwisconsin.org, run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Teacher Assistants, was accessible after its launch last week until at least Friday.

But by Monday, the website organizers discovered the site was blocked for those using the state’s free Wi-Fi network available inside the Capitol building.  The website is used to coordinate protest actions and keep volunteers informed about the pushback campaign against the Walker Administration.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate says that the site was put on a blacklist typically used to filter out pornography sites so that protesters inside the Capitol could not access the site.

Former Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Charles Hoornstra said that, if Walker is blocking the website, it could be a violation of state and federal laws concerning free speech laws.

This isn’t the first time the state government has been accused of cutting off Internet access.  The Teaching Assistants Association earlier accused state authorities of cutting off Wi-Fi access to a room they had taken over as a headquarters inside of the Capitol.

Some of the activists in Madison used the occasion to draw comparisons with Internet shutdowns in Egypt and Libya. CNN picked up the story, taking it nationwide, and Sachin Chheda, a Democratic activist and former IT employee at the Capitol, said someone inside the government would have to consciously add the website to a blacklist for the software to block access.

The Walker Administration offered its own explanation of the blocked website, claiming the state’s software initially allows access to all websites until it is updated, then blocks sites until they are manually reviewed.

Department of Administration spokeswoman Carla Vigue said, “DOA’s security software automatically blocked the site, as it does all new websites.”

“No one here at DOA decided to block it or took action to do so,” he said. “The website is handled like any other website.”

Activists at the state Capitol tested Vigue’s explanation today, visiting newly registered domains with new websites, and had no trouble accessing any of them.

“The state got caught censoring and now they are making up stories to distract and deflect,” Paul Jeson tells Stop the Cap! “Since when does net nanny software require the manual review of every website in the world to unblock access — the whole point of the software is to arrive with a blacklist filter pre-installed and programming that checks content in real-time looking for triggers.”

Jeson says unless a protester exposed themselves in a photo republished on the site, there is no reason it should have been blocked.

“I doubt Gov. Walker himself ordered the block, but some of his associates treat the 1st Amendment as something worthy of defending only when it protects their point of view,” Jeson opines.  “Imagine what would happen if the Capitol Wi-Fi blocked Fox News or one of several anti-union, pro-Walker websites that popped up at the same time defendwisconsin.org was launched; I am not surprised none of those sites favorable to the governor’s position have complained about similar blocks.”

The governor’s office late in the day tried to change the subject.

“The Democratic Party should spend less time lying about Gov. Walker, and more time trying to get their AWOL State Senators back to Wisconsin,” said a statement released by the governor’s office.

CNN covered this statement from the Wisconsin Democratic Party on a poor telephone line. (1 minute)
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