“Broadband” has become a buzzword in recent years. East Asia leads broadband penetration in the world. Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are regarded as the leading “Asian Tiger” countries with significant amounts of export by their electronics industry, and also as the “Net Tigers” when it comes to the Internet. In the case of broadband, however, Korea is the sole front runner followed by Hong Kong, while Singapore and Japan are lagging behind. What factors exist behind these differences?

Level of economy is not the biggest factor to determine broadband development, nor does government policy to promote broadband have much influence. Rather, social factors such as political situation, people’s mentality and cultural context may play more significant roles than economy and policy.

In Korea, bottom-up, grass-roots entrepreneurship and aggressive Netizenship contributed the most to its rapid explosion of broadband, coupled with accidental excess of bandwidth supply, fierce market competition and freedom-hungry citizens’ activities. The conservative and rigid institutional frameworks of Singapore and Japan may be the biggest barriers that suppress the healthy development of broadband applications, services and the market.