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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

South Korea at least used to have blazingly fast internet infrastructure. Of course that didn't make up for shitty banking websites that you could only use by running Internet Explorer and allowing it to install "security plugins" that hook into Windows kernel, but at least the internet was fast, and it did give Korea an edge for its IT industry.

That was, I think, about twenty years ago.

I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more.

Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)

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I think this is sort of how Japan is often thought of as "land of the future" because where was a brief period around the 2000s where new tech adoption sort of got a little ahead of the US, but what people really missed was that they weren't ahead so much as just...kind of different?

And the reality today is that it'll seem practically backwards to a Westerner - i.e. tons of paper forms and bureaucracy for things like banking and rental applications.

I was in Japan in 2008 and the cellphones there were from the future! I remember being awed seeing people watching TV on the subway on their phones..

There was a bunch of infrastructure and services provided by the actual phone company NTT DoCoMo (as opposed to generally over the Internet) that let people watch shows, play games, shop, etc.. all on their mobile devices. Stuff that we do now every day, but this was almost 20 years ago.

They also had phones built for this purpose, like ones that had rotating screens that went into landscape mode (imagine holding a "T"-shaped device) for watching TV..

So it certainly felt like they were ahead, but you're right, it was a very different approach with everything coming from the phone company itself, and one that wasn't set up to stay competitive or stay ahead..

Other examples of this are the Satellaview for the SNES and the 64DD for the Nintendo 64, both of which were only launched in Japan. The Satellaview let you download games and the 64DD let you browse the internet. Apparently they'd also planned to have multiplayer online gaming for the 64DD, but that was never released.

On an infrastructure level Japan is literally not even in the same reality as the US. The infrastructure works, everything is clean and works, the toilets are usable and good. The mobile internet infrastructure is honestly fine and most likely better than what you'd be able to get in the US (especially as a foreigner).

It will not seem backwards to a "Westerner" today. The only place where you'd really encounter forms as a human being is in government interactions (and possibly banking), which is not unusual or even particularly backwards.

I remember visiting SK back in 2005-6, and the only way to get online was to install an IE plugin.

This was true in 2013 as well. I've heard this has changed in the last 5 years or so, though.

In early 2000s I used those Korean SIN number generators to access mmorpgs

I stopped when my cousin told me it was illegal

Have a lot of fond memories when there was a mini mmorpg bubble in korea

N-age still going strong it seems in 2024 ! So many rare unique korean mmorpg that will never see the light of the day!

I actually played one of those Korean mmorpgs that that an English version available ~2005 and I remember their website being a mess. It got wildly popular in the west to a point where the server started lagging and was down frequently, so they set up a second one.

Then the cheating got out of hand so they added some anti-cheat software, and shortly after they wanted people to verify their identity by sending a scan of their id/passport. This is when 99% of players left.

Honestly I think the only way to get rid of cheating in online games is to use some form of identity vetting.

I know of one place where there is zero spam and it’s because of the identity vetting infrastructure.

This is why all the Korean mmorpgs required Korean social security numbers but what ended up happening is Chinese gamers started to steal Korean identities to cheat and farm items which lead to its downfall, they simply could not deal with the large number of Chinese users.

Even source codes were stolen and Chinese mmorpgs would appear with the exact same gameplay but different skins and names.

Wild times.

SIN like from Shadowrun? Are you SINless now?

There were generators? I googled for hours to get Korean wow beta accounts.

In the early days of the internet you could download a generator written in simple visual basic im not sure how it was able to do this but worked well enough to signup and play on almost all the online games

Eventually was made illegal and what ended up happening was a huge korean social security numbers being traded online in Chinese forums (who had economic incentives to farm, hack, cheat items from korean mmorpgs)

Korean internet is still extremely fast. It hasn't decreased in price sadly though.

Gigabit links to the home were cheap in South Korea 20 years ago, something like $50USD/month, IIRC. The population is so dense, it was comparatively quick and easy to put in the infrastructure.

Some of the fastest pirate FTP sites in the world were .kr at the time, it was crazy seeing 125MB/sec inter-site transfers back then.

The ops must've set the machines up with a /dev/shm ramdisk or similar for uploads. There were no SSDs those days, so no way to even write at 125MB/sec, unless you had an unreasonably large Raid-0 array of WD Raptor HDDs, also possible.

How can prices decerease when every provider is a chaebol in bed with the government?

The government could make upgrading the infrastructure and lowering prices a priority.

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