Telecom Redux incorporating Wireless Business Review - The driving force behind Korea’s Information Society, KT’s 10 years of Internet service

Sunday, 12 October 2008

Home

Newsdesk

Public policy

The driving force behind Korea’s Information Society, KT’s 10 years of Internet service

- - - - - - -

Wireless Business Review

- - - - - - -

PR Plus International - PR and media relations

International PR Service

The driving force behind Korea’s Information Society, KT’s 10 years of Internet service

Sunday, 11 July 2004

06 July, 2004: KT commercialized KORNET, the first Internet service in Asia on 20 June, 1994. Over the past 10 years, transmission speed has become 100 times faster, backbone infrastructure has 50,000 times more capacity, and the number of users has grown to 28 million.

Although the Internet dramatically changed Korean politics, society and culture, this transformation has also seen the emergence of new and serious problems such as Spam, cyber crime and the proliferation of Internet pornography. KT is leading the "Ubiquitous age" with mobile Internet, wired & wireless network integration, and the establishment of a Broadband Converged Network.

KT CEO, Young-Kyung Lee, announced on 20 June that it would celebrate the 10th anniversary for their commercial Internet service, which was launched on 20 June, 1994 for the first time in Korea and Asia with the name "KORNET." Before KORNET, only universities and some research institutes had used the Internet only as an academic network for research information exchange and education, and the general public couldn't gain access to the Internet easily.

KORNET had commercialized the Hana network, the domestic academic Internet network, and initially provided services by dial-up modem. With a speed of just 9.6Kbps, less than one hundredth of the current average Internet speed, the price was 40,000 won a month, which is more expensive than ADSL service is now!. The dedicated Internet line service for companies was 4 million won a month for just 1.544Mbits/s (T1 level).

The dial-up modem speed continuously increased to 28.8Kbps by 1995 and 56Kbps by 1999. ISDN service, once called ‘The Star of the Internet’, has all but disappeared now, offered 128Kbps, a breakthrough speed at the time. With the emergence of high-speed Internet service through cable modems in 1998 and the ADSL service using existing telephone lines in 1999, growth in Internet services skyrocketed by more than 100% each subsequent year

The 10 million mark for the number of Internet users was reached in 1999, and likewise in 2002 for the number of high-speed Internet subscribers. Now the total number of Internet users is around 28 million (as of June 2003), and the number of high-speed Internet subscribers is around 11.5 million The Internet infrastructure backbone capacity for KORNET expanded from 10Mbps nationwide in early 1994 to 489Gbps in 10 years, a nearly 50,000-fold increase

With respect to revenues as well, Internet services have increased by 10,000%, from 36.4 billion won in 1999 to 3700 billion won in 2003, accounting for 13& of total revenues from core telecommunications, and the Internet services industry has grown to become one of the important new growth engines in the Korean economy.

There are three reasons why the Internet has spread so rapidly in Korea:
• from the aspect of demand, people had high enthusiasm for self-education and quickly adapted to the new culture, and new convenient services such as online games, PC rooms, Internet broadcasting, online banking and trading have gained wide acceptance;
• from the aspect of supply, thanks to the fierce competition among service providers including KT, Hanaro and Thrunet, consumers enjoyed cheap prices, and network construction costs were saved due to Korea's high population density with over 50% of households residing in apartments;
• from the aspect of policy; the Internet boom has been continuously promoted by the government through the e-Korea program. It established and pushed the `General plans for building high-speed information and communications networks within a time span of 10 years [from 1995 to 2005].

On the other hand, in the past 10 years the Internet has also greatly influenced Korean society and culture. New cultural codes and tools such as messenger, blogs, avatars, and uljjang (handsome face) have appeared, and the Internet's influential power as the best form of interactive communications has increased. New cultural trends have been maximized through the Inernet during the World Cup in 2002, the presidential election in 2002, and the National assembly election in 2004.

A recent survey found that 65.5% of the total population above 6-years old are using the Internet 12.5 hours a week on average, and middle school students used the Internet for 3.1 hours and high school students use it for 2.8 hours every day on average, This is longer than the time they spend watching TV (2.4 hours a day on average), which clearly shows that the Internet is quickly replacing TV as the major media source.

From the industrial point of view, a wide variety of Internet businesses have sprung up and continue to grow including the 10 trillion won Gigital contents market such as portals and games, and the 7 trillion won Internet shopping market.

However, the ubiquity of the Internet has also created many problems such as SPAM and a flood of sexually explicit materials, and Internet abuse. At present, 84% of e-mails circulating on KT's Internet network are SPAM, an increase of 440% compared to the same period last year, and the number is rising. Internet abuse is also a serious issue, with 27.5% of middle school students and 23.8% of high school students addicted to it. The number of harmful Korean sites is around 170,000, only second to those presented in English, which is a 3-fold increase during the last year alone. About 250 new Korean harmful websites start up each day.

Furthermore, P2P (peer-to-peer file sharing) services, which started with Web search in the early days of Internet service, have now changed to the direct "give-and-take" of files. They are creating many new problems such as illegal duplication and indiscriminate distribution of copyrighted materials including music (MP3), videos, and programs, circulation of sexually explicit materials and malicious codes and a decrease of network speed due to their excessive "tie-up "of communication network capacity.

In the future, the Internet will develop into an integrated wired and wireless communications entity and an IP-based BCN (Broadband Convergence Network).KT is opening the age of integrated wired and wireless communications by activating public wireless LAN services as represented by the Nespot service that has already secured about 400,000 subscribers. With their mobile Internet service to be launched at the end of 2005, KT will build a truly ubiquitous environment within which you can use high-speed Internet services anytime anywhere.

In addition, KT will build a BCN (Broadband Convergence Network) by 2007 which will blend communications and broadcasting into one through the development of existing communication networks into broadband capable of handling over 100Mpbs and the IP-based integration of those networks, enabled by the establishment of FTTH (Fiber To The Home) and VDSL technologies. Based on BCN, KT plans to introduce various new services including video telephone, video conferencing, multimedia messaging, broadband network-based education and games.

www.kt.co.kr