A reflection on South Korea’s broadband success

Abstract

Drawing on the extant literature on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Korea, this essay identifies and discusses three factors that have contributed to Korea’s broadband achievements. The first factor is the Korean state’s long-term objectives, including policy principles. The second is regulatory decisions, including late privatization. The third factor is unique attributes of Korea, including population density and the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis. The essay also discusses Korea’s ICT successes alongside its ‘English Fever’.

Keywords

broadband communication policy English Fever globalization information and communication technology Internet South Korea

South Korea (hereinafter Korea) represents a remarkable case of success in regard to information and communication technology (ICT) development. Korea is commonly recognized as the most ‘connected’ nation on earth. For the year 2016, it was ranked number one on the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) ICT Development Index (ITU, 2016). According to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data for 2016, Korea had 108.3 data and voice subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, which was the highest number of combined data and voice subscriptions in the world (OECD, 2016). In addition, Korea has received awards from the OECD and United Nations for its e-government services, which are widely recognized as unparalleled (Beschel et al., 2016). In 2013, the most recent year during which the OECD released data on household Internet penetration in the United States, only 74.4% of American households were connected to the Internet. In contrast, Korea in 2013 boasted more than 98% household connectivity, the highest in the world (OECD, 2016). Korea’s current presence at the cutting edge of broadband technology is undeniable, exemplified in its introduction of 5G at the Pyeongchang winter Olympics in 2018 (Toh, 2018). The speed, price, and adoption of the Internet in Korea have undeniably been one of the great ICT success stories of the past 50 years.

This essay examines three interrelated but arguably distinct features that have allowed Korea to become a world leader in broadband technology. The first is vision, by which I mean long-term policy objectives of the Korean state. The second feature is regulation, which refers to the regulatory measures that the Korean state has adopted in order to realize its policy objectives. The third feature is Korea’s unique attributes, by which I refer to specific aspects of Korean culture, geography, and history.

Having sketched out the ways in which these three factors contributed to Korea’s world-class broadband environment, I then compare Korea’s success in ICT to its equally impressive preoccupation with English and suggest that the former can be better understood when considered alongside the latter. I conclude by discussing why it is unlikely that other nations can successfully follow in Korea’s ICT footsteps.

Until the 1970s, both North and South Korea were impoverished nations with roughly comparable per capita gross domestic products (GDPs; Cumings, 1997). Given this history, its current successes in ICT development are even more impressive. In spite of Korea’s comparatively late economic development, Korea quickly became the world leader in broadband penetration. In fact, Korea has ‘consistently been the global leader of broadband Internet deployment since 1999’ (Lee and Chan-Olmsted, 2004: 3). Korea’s early emergence as a leader in broadband Internet, coupled with its late development in comparison to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, makes it a fascinating case study of broadband policy, regulation, and vision.

This essay does not attempt to add to the already detailed scholarship on telecommunications in Korea (consult the references page) but instead seeks to provide a broad overview of ICT development in Korea that sketches out the role that long-term policy objectives, regulatory measures, and unique attributes have played in contributing to Korea’s current status as the world’s most connected country. Its discussion of English as a communication technology allows for a new angle from which to consider both Korea’s hyper connectivity and its ‘English Fever’ (see Park, 2009).

Long-term objectives

Dirigisme, or government intervention in economic policy, has since the 1960s been Korea’s de-facto economic model, featuring top–down initiatives with strong collaboration between the state and private industry. The first major telecom project came in the early 1980s when the state attempted to domestically produce a telephone switching device. The end product, the TDX, was the result of collaboration between policymakers, academics, and industry (Jin, 2006; Yoon, 2016). The Korean state directed almost 1% of total GDP to the project and its success made Korea only the 10th nation in the world to be able to domestically produce a telephone switching device (Yoon, 2016: 43). The success of the TDX project, and the advances in technological know-how that enabled it, laid the groundwork for Korea’s first mini-computer, the TICOM, as well as its first dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip (Larson, 1995; Yoon, 2016). These successes in turn equipped Korea with a host of engineers, academics, and officials who possessed both the technological know-how and vision to help set Korea on a path toward success in broadband.

Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI), which developed the TDX, represents a clear example of the symbiotic relationship between government, researchers, and private industry that paved the way for Korea’s contemporary technological prowess. The government-funded institute has since 1976 collaborated with academics and industry to produce the TDX, domestic computers, and 4G-LTE technology and regularly beat out the University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the number of patents it is awarded each year (ETRI, 2014).

Starting with ETRI and the TDX may seem an odd genealogy to trace for an essay discussing primarily broadband, but it is an important place to start because much of Korea’s success in broadband has been due in large part to similar long-term projects featuring government direction and industry implementation. TDX also represented Korea’s first major, long-term, telecom project, the scale of which was not to be rivaled until the Korean Information Infrastructure (KII) project of the mid 1990s.

While more difficult than regulatory measures to empirically single out as efficacious, long-term policy objectives have been incredibly important to Korea’s broadband success story. The Korean government from the beginning took a long-term approach to ICT that holistically emphasized the future economic importance of computerization, information, and the Internet rather than any one specific technology. Many of these technological innovations gained traction in part because of political and cultural factors. For example, the 1980s saw the Korean government pay increased attention to the importance of emerging technologies as part of a concentrated push away from chemicals and heavy industry and toward ICTs. The fervor with which the government pursued advancing its ICT sector is in fact somewhat unsurprising if one considers the similarities to Korea’s top-down initiatives in building other world-class industries, such as the steel and shipbuilding industries.

Having conceived of national connectedness in the late 1970s under the ‘Five-Year Basic Plan for Administrative Computerization’ (Kim and Choi, 2016: 15), the government first instituted a plan for computerizing its administrative organs. This early push toward ICT ‘was part of a broader national strategy to use technology to shift Korea’s economic paradigm from an industrial-based growth economy to a knowledge-based economy and information society’ (Beschel et al., 2016: 5). The early 1990s saw the implementation of this vision on a grand stage: president Kim Young Sam made segyehwa (globalization) the centerpiece of his administration (Kim, 2000) and in March of 1995, his administration initiated the KII project, which Jin (2017) refers to as ‘the largest project in the history of Korean government’ (p. 720). With the goal of transitioning Korea into a knowledge-based economy (Choudrie and Lee, 2004), the project ‘was revised various times during the construction due to the rapid changes in technological innovations and market demands’ (Lee and Chan-Olmsted, 2004: 15–16). The plan included implementing a high-speed broadband network plan that would invest US$45 billion over the next 20 years. After 2 years, the plan was amended to use only US$32 billion, but finish 10 years early, in 2005 (Yoon, 2016: 46). The fact that the timeline was moved ahead so drastically speaks to the deep conviction of Korean leaders that broadband would play a crucial role in advancing Korea’s national competitiveness in the 21st century.

In keeping with its commitment to public–private partnership, in 1999, the state launched the Cyber Korea 21 project, which sought to advance the technological advancement of information and communication networks while also attracting investment from the private sector (Shin and Koh, 2017: 35). Cyber Korea 21 and affiliated programs included a major push for digital literacy, targeting in particular the poor, the disabled, housewives, the elderly, and prison inmates (Kim, 2011). These large-scale, top-down initiatives were given priority by the Korean government because broadband was considered an issue of national competitiveness.

Universal service was a major goal of the Korean state and fit in well with Korea’s egalitarian ethos of the time; Korea’s transition to an information society was coeval with rapidly falling rates of inequality (Fields and Yoo, 2000). Drawing on Choi (1999), Jin (2006: 4) suggests that part of Korea’s reticence to privatize the telecom industry stemmed from the state’s long-term vision of universal service. In order to successfully implement regulation that encouraged investment in telecom, Korea needed to have a long-term vision and a strong conviction in the importance of universally available and affordable broadband. The presence of both vision and conviction is exemplified by the fact that while broadband became available in Korea in 1998, 1 year after the United States, by 2003 Korea had the highest rate of broadband penetration in the world (Lee and Chan-Olmsted, 2004: 3). The incredibly rapidity of Korea’s broadband progression required mobilization behind a central vision (the KII) that was initiated by the Ministry of Information and Communications and maintained through multiple 5-year cycles of new presidential administrations.

Korea’s steadfast commitment to its ‘national long-term plan for building information and knowledge-based society’ (Bong Choi et al., 2014: 7) must be credited as one of the primary reasons Korea took the lead in broadband availability and adoption. The importance of the state’s long-term vision and commitment to universal service becomes clearer if placed into the context of adherence to ‘policy principles’. Policy principles refer to ‘coherent statements based on underlying norms and values that help policymakers and organizations respond to issues and take part in legislative and regulatory activities’ (Picard and Pickard, 2017: 7). Policy principles are contrasted with piecemeal regulation, which deals with specific communication media as they arise, and can result in confusing and contradictory policies and regulation. Policy principles, however, can help guide policy making by making explicit norms and long-term goals.

Despite the importance of policy principles, they can often be subordinated to immediate economic imperatives, which in turn can lead to corporate underinvestment in important communication infrastructure and result in market failure. Furthermore, government intervention to address market failures in such cases is increasingly open to criticism, as neoliberal economic rationale becomes more widespread (Picard and Pickard, 2017: 13). However, Hundt (2015) points out that the introduction of neoliberal ideas/reforms in Korea did not result in the expected deregulation and exit of government from its former role in development. Instead, the state used neoliberal justifications as a way to strengthen its development role. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis gave the Korean state the impetus and authority to throw its full weight behind broadband implementation, in spite of the neoliberal restructuring it agreed to as terms of the IMF bailout. Korea’s willingness to address market failures head on, and resist pressure to privatize the Korean Telecommunications Authority (KT), exemplifies the degree to which policy principles in Korea were prioritized over short-term economic concerns and a neoliberal worldview more generally. Through the KII, Cyber Korea 21, and further initiatives, the Korean state articulated a long-term vision that is reflective of a commitment to policy principles of accessibility and inclusion (see Picard and Pickard, 2017).

Regulation

It was not only long-term vision for an information society that allowed Korea’s broadband successes but also specific regulatory measures such as Korea’s careful late-stage privatization.

The most important institutional actors in the development of Korean telecom regulation were probably Korea’s original monopoly common carrier, KT, and the ministry that oversaw it: the MIC (Ministry of Communication, which in 1993 became the Ministry of Information and Communication and in 2013 became the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning). In the 1980s, the MIC led all other government agencies in R&D spending, in large part because it was legislated to use 3% of total profits from the communications business operations for research; this allowed for the development of the TDX, as well as a number of other important ICT developments (Larson, 1995: 119–120).

KT was originally a branch of MIC, but was eventually fully privatized in 2002 (Jin, 2006), though it had from 1991 operated in a duopoly in the international service market with another provider, DACOM (Larson, 1995). Privatization of KT was originally announced in 1993 (Jin, 2006: 3), but the process took place gradually, amid incredibly rapid changes in the Korean economy as a whole, and the ICT sector in particular. Consider for example that real GDP per person in PPP more than doubled in this period, from under US$8000 in 1987 to more than US$20,000 in 2002 (The World Bank, 2017). The telecom industry grew at an equally unprecedented growth rate, with Larson (1995: 11) estimating a per annum growth rate of 20% during the 1980s. The effects of privatization were positive and resulted in competition which raised quality and lowered prices (Jin, 2006). As of 2014, the private companies formed when KT was broken up still dominated the industry, with SKT and the (still large) KT having 27.4 million and 16.5 million subscribers, respectively, with LG Uplus coming in third with 10.90 million subscribers (Shin and Koh, 2017: 32).

A confluence of foreign and domestic pressures pushed Korea toward privatization. The United States had placed Korea under enormous pressure to privatize its telecom industry since the 1980s (Jin, 2006) and it was a stated policy goal of Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa (globalization) drive. In addition, the inauguration of the World Trade Organization system in 1995 also spurred the Korean government toward privatization. Korea’s chaebol (large, family-owned conglomerates) also pushed for privatization in order to both lower their own internal telecom costs and also enter the telecom market more broadly. Finally, Korea’s bailout from the IMF following the 1997 Asian financial crisis came with stipulations that Korea privatize and allow for the entrance of foreign competitors to its markets (Jin, 2006). In essence, by the late 1990s, privatization was all but assured. However, despite its eventual privatization, Korea bucked the trend of many developing countries and ‘achieved network expansion and teledensity growth largely utilizing domestically raised capital in the monopoly era’ (Kim and Jayakar, 2010: 8). In sum, the state was reticent about privatization, and when privatization occurred, it was an elongated and gradual process that purposefully resisted dictation from outside capital.

In addition to late privatization, Korea also engaged in a variety of other regulatory measures to ensure widespread broadband adoption and usage. This included supporting both supply and demand of broadband. On the supply side, it instituted measures such as construction regulation that mandated broadband connectivity for new buildings (Lee and Chan-Olmsted, 2004: 32–33). It also provided free broadband to middle and high schools (Shin and Koh, 2017). The Korean government was also one of the earliest adopters of broadband, which helped to stimulate demand (Beschel et al., 2016; Shin and Koh, 2017). By the early 2000s, competition was robust and Korean service providers like SKT, KT, and LG Uplus battled to provide high-quality service at low prices (Shin and Koh, 2017: 35).

Korea’s resistance to early privatization/foreign competition allowed it greater latitude in implementing top-down directives that were at odds with contemporaneous market forces. This included high early levels of broadband network infrastructure investment that prompted ‘many countries to believe that Korea was investing too much into its broadband network infrastructure’ (Yoon, 2016: 53). Despite such criticisms of its state-mandated infrastructure investments, Korea persisted and despite the combination of regulatory measures promoting equity of access as well as almost one-billion US dollars in preferential loans, Korea was also able to achieve not only the highest broadband penetration rates but also remarkable equity in rural–urban broadband deployment (Choudrie and Lee, 2004: 107).

Thus far, this essay has discussed the long-term policy objectives and regulatory mechanisms that facilitated ICT development in Korea and which laid the groundwork for broadband implementation and adoption. It now turns to non-state factors that are uniquely Korean.

Uniquely Korean attributes

In addition to long-term policy objectives (vision) and regulatory measures, Korea’s broadband development was aided by a number of factors that most other countries lack or which Korea possesses at particularly high levels. Taken together, these accidents of geography and culture together helped ensure expedient deployment and adoption of broadband. The most obvious unique attribute that helped the expansion of broadband is the extremely small size of the nation itself. South Korea is roughly the size of Kentucky, with the majority of the population residing in cities. More importantly, more than 90% of all households are located within a 1.4-mile radius around a mobile broadband switchboard and roughly half the population lives in apartment complexes (Shin and Koh, 2017: 35). This speaks to the fact that even if other countries were able to match Korea’s political mobilization in support of broadband development/deployment, many would still face the challenge that their populations are far more geographically dispersed.

However, despite Korea’s density, and unlike other developing countries starting broadband initiatives, Korea did not solely pursue a teledensity model aimed at urban areas but instead made a concerted effort toward ‘regionally balanced network expansion’ (Kim and Jayakar, 2010: 5). This reflected a concerted effort by the Korean state to promote equitable distribution of resources in response to an awareness that certain regions had suffered underdevelopment and discrimination during the years of totalitarian rule (see Park, 2003; on this and other aspects of Korea’s development, see also Lie, 2000). Korea’s small size (when compared with countries like China and the United States) coupled with its early dedication to achieving urban–rural equity in broadband distribution allowed Korea to avoid some of the inequalities of broadband access that have continued to plague countries like the United States and China, in which there exists a considerable ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural populations (see Fong, 2009; Perrin, 2017; Shapiro, 2015; Strover, 2011)

The second of Korea’s unique characteristics that enabled its broadband successes is education. Many scholars of broadband have highlighted the important role that education played in spurring the broadband adoption in Korea (Bong Choi et al., 2014; Kang, 2017; Shin and Koh, 2017). Although other East Asian countries have also been recognized as placing a premium on education, Korea is generally recognized as the most education-obsessed nation on earth (Seth, 2002). According to OECD data, young Koreans have the highest levels of obtained tertiary education in the OECD (2016) and Marginson (2011: 696) notes that in 2007, the tertiary gross enrollment rate (GER) was 96% in South Korea compared with 58% in Japan.

This preoccupation with education drove broadband deployment both on the demand and supply side. On the supply side, the Korean government invested heavily in making their classrooms more technologically connected, including a 1.3-billion-dollar investment in large-screen televisions, computers, and Internet access for 220,000 classrooms (Shin and Koh, 2017). The Internet also became seen as an important tool for children to complete their assignments, and adoption correspondingly increased (Shin and Koh, 2017). The Korean government and industry actively pushed technology and the Internet as important education tool and in Korea the computer was marketed for educational rather than business purposes (Kang, 2017: 730). The discourse of segyehwa (globalization) added urgency to the project of broadband access, and Korean parents invested heavily in their children’s technological literacy such that by 2001, 77% of Korean households had a PC, in comparison with only about 56% in the United States (Lee and Chan-Olmsted, 2004: 21).

While Koreans’ desire for education no doubt played a crucial role in helping Korea quickly acclimate to broadband, the desire for entertainment also played a critical role. Korean had earlier ‘by chance’ adopted the computer as their main platform for gaming (Kang, 2017: 730), and Korea was the birthplace of the first graphic massive multiplayer online game, Kingdom of the Winds, released in 1996 (Jin and Chee, 2008: 38). More recently, Korea has been commonly cited as one of the most computer game–obsessed nations on earth, where top game players are celebrities (Mozur, 2014). Computer games also played a major role in the rise of PC bangs (Internet cafes) in Korea. A place where people could cheaply rent computers to play games, PC bangs have been credited with raising interest in and demand for broadband Internet services in Korea. By 2001, the number of PC bangs in Korea numbered over 20,000 (Choudrie and Lee, 2005). The relationship between education and gaming is unsurprising in that many parents made the financial investment of buying a computer in order to boost the educational potential of their children, only to have their children also use the computer for gaming (Kang, 2017).

Thus, within the dynamics of individual families, computer/broadband growth was driven by parents’ desires for their children’s education and children’s desires for access to gaming. It is hard to stress the former point enough. Korean parents have long been noted for their dedication to furthering their children’s educational prospects (see Seth, 2002), and this has been doubly true for areas which are seen to be of importance within the global economy. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 (known colloquially as ‘IMF’ in Korea). Labor market restructuring was insisted upon by the IMF as a condition of Korea’s bailout, and average workers’ formerly bright prospects for near lifelong employment were dashed (see Crotty and Lee, 2002).

In this new, neoliberal labor market, competition was heightened, causing parents to invest even further in their children’s education. Writing about this ‘neoliberal transformation’, Yang (2017: 741) discusses the promotion of ‘ICTs as tools for survival in the context of intense and ongoing global competition crucial for the competitiveness of both the Korean nation and individual Koreans’. In response to the IMF crisis, the Korean government doubled down on its rhetoric of segyehwa (globalization) introduced a few years earlier by the Kim Young Sam administration. This climate heightened Korea’s collective focus on ICT and broadband. Kang (2017) points out ‘Internet adoption was never impressive in Korea until 1998 when the country was hit hard by the Asian financial crisis’ (p. 729). Further proof of Korea’s renewed focus on outward facing and global technology can be found in the ‘English Fever’ (see Park, 2009) that intensified following the crisis. Lee (2014) notes that ‘with the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, English became a more explicit priority in curricular reforms and the public began to associate English as a vehicle for social mobility’ (p. 98). Writing of the crisis, Park and Abelmann (2004) likewise point out that ‘English took on particular value at this historical juncture’ (p. 650).

Indeed, English can be considered as another ICT in Korea’s drive toward global integration and national competitiveness. Perhaps most crucial to the dual adoption of both broadband and English was the fact that English was the undisputed language of the Internet. In this vein, writing of Korea’s growing English obsession, Seth (2002) writes, ‘English was both the language of democratic nations and the medium of global commerce, science, technology, and culture’ (p. 234).

In considering the unique conditions that have given rise to Korea’s unparalleled broadband success, it would to be remiss to discount English. In fact, while the numbers on Internet penetration and adoption in Korea are impressive, they may be rivaled by the statistics on English learning: Koreans receive upward of 20,000 hours of English education (Kim, 2013), and by 2006, Koreans were spending up to US$752 million a year on English proficiency tests alone (Song, 2011: 38). Thus, the push for broadband has been contextualized in relation to other social forces shaping Korea during that time, such as a renewed focus on global education, of which English was the prime example. Considering English alongside broadband, Korea can be understood as neither suffering from an ‘English Fever’ (see Park, 2009) nor embodying a techno-utopia, but instead as being communication technology oriented in general. Including English within the purview of Korea’s drive toward connectivity (whether through language or material infrastructure) allows for a reorientation away from accounts of technology that privilege scientific advances and material hardware and opens up the possibility for considering both broadband and English as technologies (see Foucault, 1988).

Conclusion

This essay has laid out, on a macroscopic level, some of the reasons for Korea’s success in the deployment and adoption of broadband Internet. Specifically, it has identified three interrelated but distinct reasons for Korea’s success. First, it highlighted the importance of vision, that is, it emphasized the Korean state’s long-term objectives for connectivity, universal service, and an information-oriented economy. Second, it examined some of the specific regulations that were put into place in order to achieve those objectives, such as gradual privatization. Third, this essay discussed how several distinct Korean attributes combined to help ensure Korea’s broadband success. Finally, it has suggested that Korea’s pursuit of ICT extends beyond the development of new material technology, but extends to the technology of English as well.

Despite highlighting ways in which Korea successfully developed an affordable and widely accessible Internet infrastructure, this essay is not intended as a triumphalist endorsement of Korea’s Internet culture. There are many points of concern regarding the Internet in Korea (as in other countries). For example, in 2015, approximately 17% of all students (including elementary, middle-school, and high-school students) experienced digital bullying (Kang, 2017: 723). The incredible penetration of Korea’s connectivity has also given rise to worries about Internet addiction, with an estimated 10% of teenagers addicted to the Internet (Fifield, 2016). These sobering statistics reflect that measuring success solely by rates of usage and penetration can conceal negative externalities that accompany broadband.

Despite the problems that accompany Korea’s high levels of connectivity, Korea represents a remarkable case of success with respect to the rapidity and equality of its broadband deployment. Furthermore, its position as a world leader in broadband is unlikely to change in the near future, given its investments in new technologies of the future, such as 5G. Finally, this essay concludes by noting that it will be extremely difficult for other countries to follow in Korea’s footsteps in achieving such high degrees of connectivity and low prices. Korea’s present-day successes are the result of a long series of historical investments in technologies like the TDX, which helped create the synergies between politicians, experts, and business that ultimately paved the way for Korea’s contemporary broadband success. Korea’s dirigisme development model, population density, and single-minded focus on globalization and national competitiveness helped steer it onto a unique path of connectivity that will be difficult for other states to follow.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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