Scot Rourke, OneCommunity and Knight Center of Digital Excellence President and CEO, at the Gangnam Conference in Seoul, South Korea

Welcome to Seoul, South Korea, where reality TV involves the viewer.  Want to renew your driver’s license?  If you live in Seoul, you do it in your living room, through your HD cable box/modem/video player powered by a 1 Gigabit fiber optic connection that has an average of 100 Mbps download rate.

This is how South Koreans do business with government, whether it’s to renew a license or get a building permit.  The top 300 government services are available via a resident’s or business’ broadband connection through their cable box, their remote control, and a home printer.

This level of connectivity is the result of 14 years of planning and learning from the missteps of other countries.

After attending a recent conference in Seoul, OneCommunity and Knight Center of Digital Excellence President Scot Rourke, who attended as keynote speaker and 2008 Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) Visionary of the Year, estimated it would take the United States more than a decade to catch up to South Korea’s current connection rates.

WHY?:

• Led by government incentives and investment via strong public-private partnerships, South Korea now has broadband available in almost 100 percent of the nation at an average download rate of 100 Mbps. Meanwhile, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a federal broadband strategy and we rank 15th among industrialized nations (and 24th by some estimates) in broadband penetration.

• The South Koreans lead the world in fiber to each home, delivering 100 Mbps average speed for as little at $25 per month. That includes voice, video, cable and Internet access.

• The South Korean government recently committed $26 billion toward further development of a broadband infrastructure. South Korea’s new goal? One Gps download speed to each resident by 2012.   By contrast, America’s new stimulus legislation earmarks about $7 billion for broadband infrastructure. And we’re not getting close to 1 Gbps.  The United States’ current definition of broadband as defined by the FCC states that the speed is 768 Kbps, the basic speed for standard e-mail and Web surfing, but too slow for clear video streaming. The largest institutions in the U.S. don’t have a gigabit in speed, and the South Koreans are going to put it in homes.

Here are some things Rourke learned about the Gangnam District, which is the South Korean equivalent of our Silicon Valley:

• An average of four documents per citizen are issued annually through the government’s TV Web portal, with 64 percent of citizens registered;

• Fifteen percent of taxes are collected online;

• Thirty-eight percent of citizens subscribe to an e-mail system that asks for comment on proposed laws and regulations;

• As a result of the eGovernment program, the Gangnam District has been able to redirect 25 percent of its government staff while increasing citizen satisfaction levels (as determined by online surveys). This increase in efficiency has freed up more funding for additional programming;

• A Regional Information Classroom provides free distance learning over the Internet to 600,000 children and seniors.

It doesn’t end there, either.  Just ask any Gangnam District resident who watches mobile Internet TV on the high-speed train ride to and from work.

“They have the infrastructure to innovate the software of the future,” Rourke said. “They have the devices, the infrastructure, and the engineers. Who’s going to innovate more? Ready? Go.”

Tags: bandwidth, broadband, digital, infrastructure, Internet, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Scot Rourke, utilities