South Korean Government is planning to push for a project that will provide accurate information regarding speed of South Korea’s ultra-fast internet.
Ministry of Science, ICP and Future Planning (MSIP) and National Information Society Agency (NIA) announced on the 12th that it will be starting ‘a system that will measure quality of internet of foreign countries’. Goal of this system is to install servers in major global countries and operate ‘internet quality measuring system (speed.nia.or.kr)’, which is provided by NIA, in those countries.
MSIP and NIA are going to install servers in the U.S. (2 branches), Japan, and England in November and develop systems that will measure quality of internet from those countries. They are also going to analyze difference between NIA’s system and a global company’s internet quality measuring system.
“Because level of our evaluation of quality of telecommunication is high as it can be benchmarked in many foreign countries, there will not be any problems in measuring quality of internet of foreign countries.” said a representative for MSIP. It is predicted that this will be an opportunity to objectively compare South Korea’s internet speed to internet speed of other countries by measuring their internet speed through an identical method that measures South Korea’s internet speed.
NIA’s measuring system measures speed of internet that is used by users during daily lives such as home or workplaces and provides results and statistics. Reason why MSIP and NIA are pushing to measure quality of internet of foreign countries is because level of South Korea’s internet is undervalued due to inaccurate investigations.
South Korea’s internet speed that is announced by a global company is only fourth of speed that users in South Korea actually feel.
According to evaluation of quality of telecommunication that was announced by MSIP last year, average download speed in South Korea by ultra-fast internet was calculated to be 99.06Mbps. On the other hand, South Korea’s internet speed during fourth quarter of last year that was announced by a global company called Akamai was only 26.1Mbps.
Based on statistics, MSIP is planning to publish current reports on quality of telecommunication services of other countries including South Korea starting from next year. MSIP has decided to submit these reports as references to international organizations such as OECD (Organisation for Co-operation and Development) and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) that announce levels of development of ICT per country.
Staff Reporter An, Hocheon | hcan@etnews.com