South Korea was ranked second in the 2008 broadband leadership, conducted by the Saïd Business School at Oxford and the University of Oviedo in Spain, and sponsored by Cisco Systems, the telecommunications equipment maker. This year, however, South Korea retakes the top spot in an annual ranking of broadband quality, achieving a broadband penetration rate of 97 percent and quality score of 66 points, followed by Japan with 64 percent and 64 points, respectively.

The study takes into account the download and upload speeds of Internet connections, rather than simply comparing market penetration rates since the quality of connections has grown more important as online services such as IPTV(Internet Protocol television) are expected to become popular in the near future.

The reason why South Korea was ranked second in the 2008 broadband leadership is that the broadband quality wasn’t good compared with its highest broadband penetration rate in the world. However, with the government’s continuous efforts such as the ultra broadband convergence network(UBcN) plan the broadband quality has been significantly improved as you can see below.

Yesterday (15 Sep. 2009), I got very excited from early morning. It was due to a TMT related conference held in Seoul, Korea. The conference was officially called ‘Telefonica Global Project Conference’, organized by KOTRA (Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency).

[Global Collaboration between Telefonica and KOTRA]

Telefonica (if you don’t know this company, just Google it!) in fact came to Korea to find potential business partners in Korea. The conference was structured mainly in two sessions: 1) Understanding of Telefonica (the company, its global business, and technology/service); 2) Private meetings between Telefonica and potential Korean partners. Since Veyond Partners is not mobile service provider, we attended the first session only.

Kim Faura, the CEO of Telefonica, Cataluna, gave presentation on ‘Where does Telefonica come from’, ‘Where Telefonica is now’, and ‘How Telefonica is evolving’ to give big picture of the company and its strategy. Followed by this, Dr. Gerard Mula, Area Manager for Internet and Multimedia Technologies at Telefonica I+D (R&D center). He focused more on ‘How they innovate their technology and services’, ‘How they collaborate with global partners’ and ‘What areas they want to collaborate with potential Korean partners’.

[Presentation by Kim Faura]

They seem to visit Korea because Korea’s mobile tech companies have so advanced technologies and services. They are basically highly flexible in terms of business partnership area but their hypothetical fields of interests include mobile 3D video, mobile contents download, User profiling services, mobile advertisements, mobile social network, u-Health, etc.

There were less than 100 attendants in the conference. But next conference in 10th November by KOTRA seemed even more interesting. The ambitious conference was called ‘Global Mobile Vision 2009’ (www.globalmobilevision.com) Next time, I expect to meet not only Telefonica but also many other global companies (113 companies) such as T-Mobile, Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Nokia, etc in one place.

I am also going to post the summary of interview with Kim Faura with one of Korea’s leading newspapers soon.