canadian headhunter

Future Shock

About a year ago I interviewed a fellow who had spent a few years working in Korea in the financial sector (doing something other than teaching English). Over the course of the interview in which we discussed a lot about the country he mentioned (in rather gushing terms) that Korea was the most wired nation on earth.

I took his statement with a grain of salt. In fact I didn't believe him. I thought he was just being a little hyperbolic about his experience there.

Well turns out I was wrong and he was not lying. Fortune has an interesting article in their latest issue called Broadband Wonderland which is about Korea and how it is leagues ahead of us in the broadband arena. I don't know if it is subscriber only content so I will post a few highlights here of what may (or should) be a glimpse into the future.

When millions of South Koreans stream out of those apartment houses to start their notoriously long workdays, many of them are clutching a broadband mobile phone. (The government anticipates that 39.5 million Koreans—of a total population of 48.5 million—will carry broadband-enabled handsets by 2008.) Young people festoon them with feathers or tassels and dangle them around their necks. The phones are for more than just talking: The mobile handset has evolved into an all-purpose multimedia device. Call it a universal remote control for daily life....

....America's broadband "fat pipes," it turns out, are mere garden hoses compared with the firehoses most South Koreans enjoy. At a time when the Federal Communications Commission defines broadband as an Internet connection capable of transmitting 200,000 bits of information a second (200 kbps), the Korean speedometer doesn't even start until transmission speeds pass the one million bits (one megabit) mark. Wired connections of eight megabits are routine—about five times faster than my American high-speed cable modem on a good day—and many Korean subscribers have already bumped up to 20-megabit connections......

......By next year, Korea's Ministry of Information and Communications wants to upgrade the nation's high-speed backbone to 50 megabits, and by 2012, the ministry says, Koreans will be luxuriating in 100-megabit cascades of data. Nobody is quite sure what they'll do with all that bandwidth, but researchers say it's inevitable that applications and services will be invented to take advantage of it. Broadband paves the way for distance education, for example; beaming interactive classes to schoolchildren, adults, and the elderly is a particularly attractive vision in a nation where learning is a national obsession. Broadband also makes possible telemedicine, letting specialists in Seoul serve patients in rural communities where advanced medical care is scarce.....

.......Back in the labs of LG Electronics there's even stranger stuff in the works. "Let me give one interesting scenario," says Park Hyun, who heads the company's "smart apartments" development work. "Every morning when you sit on the bathroom stool, your body temperature, pulse rate, and weight will be measured automatically and sent to your physician, including the test results of your urine. Your doctor will call you if he or she finds anything wrong. Whenever you are doing exercise on the running machine, all the information about your exercise, including speed, duration, inclination, and pulse rate, will be collected and your home server will give you the right exercise prescription based on your physical condition.....