Korea Ideally Suited to Adopting 'Negroponte Switch'
Korea Ideally Suited to Adopting 'Negroponte Switch'
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  • 승인 2005.12.01 12:01
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Adecade-old prophecy of a reversal of traditional signal conveyance markets, made by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, is coming true in Korea, the emerging high-tech powerhouse. In his 1995 masterpiece of futurology, "Being Digital," Negroponte made an assertion that what is now in the air will go under the ground and what is underground will go into the air. What he meant was that signals historically traveled by wireless methods, such as those for TV, would soon be transported by landline techniques and signals traveled by landline methods, such as those for telephones, would soon be transported via wireless technologies. The prediction, dubbed as the "Negroponte switch," after the name of the esteemed professor, becomes a reality worldwide with Korea leading the way. More and more television is currently going through cables than over airwaves while more and more telephones are depending on radio frequencies (cell phones) instead of copper wires buried along roads.
In particular, Korea is leading the chart in implementing the Negroponte switch thanks to the nation's state-of-the-art infrastructure and tech-savvy citizens. Roughly 38 million of the country's total 48 million population are using mobile telephony services while the number of wireline phone subscribers are on the decrease. Also cable TV is taking a firm root with a healthy customer pool. The nation's 119 system operators today combine to have about 13 million subscribers. Experts point out the Negroponte switch is a very astute prediction and Korea has reason to realize the insightful prophecy faster than other countries. "It is really simple and logical to think that bandwidth-hungry mass communications will be delivered through wires and relatively low bandwidth transmissions like phone conversations will be delivered via the airwaves," Meritz Securities analyst Jeon Sang-yong said. "Korea has advanced info-tech facilities which cater to seemingly endless needs of tech-savvy people. The two factors explain why the Negroponte switch takes place in full blossom here faster than other areas," he added. Negroponte himself heaped heavy praises on Korea's outstanding development in high-tech fields, describing the country as the "poster child" of a digital society. "Korea has gone from copycat to copied, from follower to leader. This first happened with broadband and more recently consumer electronics, games and cell phones," he told The Korea Times last year. Negroponte is a visionary-in-chief at MIT and he founded the famous Media Laboratory at the U.S. university. He made his name globally by publishing the bestseller "Being Digital," which has been translated into over 40 languages to date. In the book he said that the world of atoms is moving to a world of bits. Telephony Services Go to Air Korea started the wireless telephony services in 1984 for motorists. When the Negroponte switch was projected in 1995, the number of mobile subscribers here was a mere 1.3 million. By comparison, up to 18.6 million households or corporate users had subscriptions to landline phone services at the time. The gap shrank rapidly as people swiftly embraced mobile handsets, while the growth of fixed-line phones slowed to a snail's pace. In the five years from 1995, the number of cell phone subscribers doubled annually to 23.4 million in 1999, exceeding the 21.3 million landline users. Now there are 38.1 million mobile phone users, while fixed-line phone services are losing ground, as the figure has diminished to 22.9 million after topping at 23.5 million in 2002. "The margin will continue to widen. Korea's mobile phone market is still expanding although it shows a clear sign of saturation. In comparison, the wireline market will continue its skid," said Kim Kyung-mo, an economist at Mirae Asset. He added almost all portable devices would brace for telephony services, which will help accelerate the trend of going wireless in telecommunication. TV Signals Go Underground Korea's cable TV carriers have played a pivotal role in forcing TV signals to change their major route of over-the-air signals to underground. The nation's cable TV operators boast of up to 13 million subscribers to their wireline TV services, which catapulted them to very competitive positions in the local market. The pathway shift of TV signals, from the terrestrial waves to the landline, is expected to pick up its pace thanks to newly debuting technologies. The first technique is the Internet protocol (IP) TV, which refers to packetbased real-time broadcasting on the Internet, offering more options for customers than conventional broadcasts. IP TV has no channel limitations as long as the network doesn't suffer overloads and enjoys global coverage, while satellite and terrestrial channels can also be received by encoding them into the IP network. The broadband-powered broadcasting can be watched on various terminals from a personal computer monitor or even a TV display with the help of a set-top box. Korea's leading broadband operators including KT and Hanaro Telecom plan to launch the Web TV services next year, but the offerings will suffer start-up glitches caused by strong opposition by broadcasters, who are wary of large-sized telecom firms' reach into their markets. Despite the roadblocks, market observers claim that IP TV will eventually become the mainstream solution for videoon- the-move services through its rivalry with currently dominant over-the-air broadcasters. "It will be a time of when, not if, IP TV becomes the No.1 broadcast medium, although there are some setbacks in the canvassing stage," said Stan Jung, an analyst at Woori Securities. Korea has an another reason to claim bragging rights on changing the main route of broadcasting from wireless to landlines on its grandiose scheme of broadband convergence network (BcN). The BcN integrates traditionally separated telecom, Internet and broadcasting pipelines into a converged network while seamlessly switching over to a wired or wireless connection. It promises a speed of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), about 50 times faster than today's broadband norm of 2 Mbps. Based on this ultra-fast speed, high-definition broadcasting in the future is likely to be delivered through the BcN line to end users. "BcN would be the perfect fit with the Negroponte switch as the futuristic network is likely to enable broadcasters to send their video clips via a landline," Jung said. To facilitate the BcN project, the government plans to spend 1.2 trillion won through 2010 while encouraging an 800 billion won investment from the private sector over the same period.

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