IT Development in Korea: A Broadband Nirvana?

This book investigates the contextual factors that led Korean society to broadband success and becoming the most wired nation by scrutinizing the historical contexts surrounding the Korean Information Infrastructure project, which aimed to establish a nationwide high-speed backbone network. It details the hidden mechanisms and real challeneges faced in bubuilind the national framework: the global constraints conditioning its telecom policies, the dense state'capital linkages, and the bureaucratic desire for social control. This book provides insights into how to formulate future telecom policies along much more democratically participatory lines while restraining the overwhelming power of the telecom oligopolies. It stands alone as the comprehensible study of the East Asian model of IT development, written specifically for examining Korea's socio-historical mechanisms promoting speed and broadband mobility.