Fiber optic cables

South Korea is the poster child for high-speed internet: its fixed-connection and mobile download speeds are consistently among the fastest in the world, and its capital city, Seoul, is completely saturated with Wi-Fi.  How did they do it?

Being densely populated helped: it’s easier and cheaper to wire-up crowded cities than empty countrysides.  But the key element was the government’s pro-broadband policies.  Not only did they open up the market for competition among internet service providers, but they also invested in hard infrastructure.

Back in 2011 the New York Times reported that the South Korean planned investments of $24.6 billion in digital infrastructure.  It paid off: South Korea’s internet remains among the world’s fastest, according to testing done by Speedtest—and this is in spite of massive recent gains and investments made by other countries.

Meanwhile, America’s internet connections are slow.  This summer Forbes Magazine reported:

The US ranks 9th in the world in fixed broadband speed at 70.75 Mbps average download and 27.64 Mbps average upload. Ranking in the top ten is good but the US’s […]