Press reports on internet download speeds

Today's English edition of the Chosun Ilbo online carried a report headlined "Seoul's Seocho Internet Connection Fastest in the World."  The report indicated that the U.S. company pandonetworks had compared connection speeds of countries around the world last year and found that Seocho-dong in Seoul had a download speed of 33.5 mbps.

As readers of this blog will know, I recommend consulting the quarterly reports State of the Internet reports  issued by Akamai.  See my post on the Akamai report for the second quarter of 2011.  The third quarter 2011 Akamai report has now been released and shows that Korea maintains its world number one ranking in download speeds.   Figure 9 of that report shows Taegu as having the fastest download speeds in South Korea at 21.5 mbps, followed by Taejon at 20.1 mbps.

Measuring Global Patterns of Internet Use

The revolution in digital and mobile information that is sweeping around the globe has market research firms racing to measure changing patterns of media use.  One of these firms, globalwebindex, came to my attention in an alert this morning.    They have published some interesting data based on survey research in major markets around the world.  One of their surveys, in June of 2011, produced the accompanying graphic, which plots a measure of engagement with e-commerce (based on whether a respondent purchased a product online in the past month) against a measure of social engagement (an aggregate score of "Manage a social network," "write a blog," "comment in a forum," "upload a video," and "microblog.")

A glance at the nice graphic (click to see a full size version) shows unsurprisingly that Korea is the world leader in e-commerce (note the dark pink circle for South Korea is highest in the chart).   However, South Korea ranks lower than quite a number of countries on the measure of social engagement.  This would seem to be partly an artifact of the measure itself and cultural patterns in Korea.   A closer look at this question would require access to the full data and information on how the measure was operationalized.   However, on the face of it, I'm surprised to see South Korea ranking anywhere but near the top on a measure of social engagement.

The Importance of Speed

Reuters carried an interesting report today on Israel's plans for an ultra-fast broadband network.   Not surprisingly, they note that Korea is a world leader in this area.   Readers of  this blog will know that I've been very interested in the arguments for and against building more speed into broadband networks.  See, for example, my post back in 2009 on Korea's plans.

Also, if one needs evidence of the need for very fast broadband networks, read the article in today's Joongang Daily entitled "KT to disable data-gobbling smart-TV functions."