The United States government will be pushing forward the ‘Broadband Plan’ in order to change the internet connectivity landscape in the country. But very few people actually realize the importance of this bill. In spite of being the country which literally invented the internet and presented its fruits to the world, the US lags behind over 15 countries in the world when it comes to internet connectivity, penetration and tariff. South Korea which started off with its internet revolution much later is the world leader in all these fronts now. The slower connection in the U.S. costs about $45.50 per month on average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development whereas in South Korea, the much-faster hookup costs $17 per month less. An average broadband bill here runs about $28.50.

So the obvious question which arises is -When did this happen and how did they do it? Well surprisingly the answer to this question is more social than technical. When the internet truly and majorly arrived in the US for consumers in the 1990s, South Korea had set itself a target of connecting all its people through the internet over the next decade. The technology that Korea has used for probably the past four to five years is VDSL, and that’s a technology that’s now being put in by AT&T” in the United States. But while the communist giant has been planning to euthanize the current internet technology, the US is planning to embrace it. According to their latest reports, their plan involves bringing super-fast fiber optic cables straight into homes and that could make South Korean Internet 10 times faster than it is now.

image source:blog.radvision.com

Technically speaking Copper wires are used to transmit the internet signals from the optical fiber cables into homes and while they are a really fast medium, the speed of data transmission decreases rapidly over long distances. S Korea being a country far more thickly populated that the United States, requires less cost to set up Internet infrastructure in a tightly populated place filled with high-rise-apartments. However rural homes in the US are spread so far apart from each other that copper wires may have to link a home with a fiber optic cables that is a mile away. So it is but natural that the people of America living in scarcely populated towns and cities lose out on a great deal of speed over the fiber network.

The whole political and social climate between these countries is so different and the history is so disparate. Moreover the South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people. Something which is unheard of in the US. This policy has resulted in the fact that 94 percent of people have high-speed connections in S Korea as compared to 65 percent in the US. As a technical analyst points out “The United States is a more litigious culture than others, and the power of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate is not as strong here as it is in other countries”.

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But probably the most important factor which explains the dominance of countries like S Korea and Japan in this field is competition and the way it thrives. While in the U.S., competition among companies that provide broadband connections is relatively slim and most people choose between a cable company and a telephone company when they sign up for Internet service, S Korea and Japan have far more competition in the broadband market. It is no secret that Asian countries with fast and cheap Internet connections tend to have more competition than their European and American counterparts.

On a more macroscopic level it appears as though America has adopted a more hands on policy on internet infrastructure. While the private entities seem to be lacking the sense of purpose and competitive zeal, they fail to invest on a per capita basis in setting up connectivity for the web users. Unless there is a radical shift in the government’s approach and policy making, the people of America can expect to lag far behind their contemporaries and peers in many second and third world nations. The fate and future of US Broadband internet service now wholly depends upon the ‘Broadband Bill’.