Page History

...

This is primarily because of the high levels of Internet penetration compounded by the population. Also, the fact that these countries are densely populated, makes it easier for the telecommunication providers to extend services to large number of customers. Additionally the government policies promoting the establishment of a sound IT infrastructure has a positive impact. For example, by 2004 South Korea had spent approximately US$ 24 billion in setting up a national backbone linking government offices and public institutions. Also these same These policies have also encouraged competition among service providers resulting in decrease in the costs and increase in data rates. The summary is provided in Table 1 - Cost of Internet access.

...

On average East Asia has an Internet Penetration level of 46.74%. South Korea features the highest Internet penetration level of 71.2% with Japan and Taiwan following closely at 68.7% and 67.4%. The statistics are listed in the table below (table 2). The same is summarized in the figure - Summary of Internet Penetration. These statistics were gathered from Internet World Statistics.

...

Pinger Coverage

 The map - PingER coverage of Eastern Asia highlights the Monitoring (Red), Beacon (Blue) and Remote (green) sites in the region. The distribution of these nodes is shown in Table - 3 below.

...

Worldwide Comparison

MOS for various Regions

 Information on Calculation MOS can be found here.

TCP throughput from CERN & SLAC to World Regions

...

The traceroute results (annotated, raw) originating from China show that China is directly connected to its neighbours i.e. Taiwan (#5, 61 ms), South Korea (#27, 73 ms) and Japan (#8, 100 ms) and the traffic generally takes the direct routes. However some results show that traffic destined for selected nodes in South Korea is either routed via Japan (#7, 114 ms) or Japan and US (#16, 209 ms) or Hong Kong and United Kingdom (#54).  Similarly, for selected destinations in Japan the traffic is routed via Hong Kong (#24, 206 ms) or Taiwan (#25, >90 ms). Also, traffic for selected nodes in Taiwan is sometimes directed via South Korea (#27, 245 ms). On the other hand when the destination is within China, the traffic stays within China which is what one would expect. Random tests to other countries in the Asia showed traffic flowing as expected (i.e. as per the submarine links). However the results below were interesting. The RTT values encouraged us to conclude that traffic was indeed traversing these links.

China to Thailand: China->Hong Kong->Japan->Thailand OR China -> Thailand
China to Vietnam: China->Hong Kong-> United Kingdom->Hong Kong-> Vietnam
China to Singapore: China ->Hong Kong->Japan->Singapore
China to Malaysia: China->Hong Kong->Malaysia

...

There are many indicators of countries' development from organizations such as the International Telecommunications Union, the United Nations, the CIA, the World Bank try to classify countries by their development. They are quite challenging and require careful consideration of: what can be measured, how useful is it, how well it is defined, how it changes with time, how it changes from country to country, the cost of measuring, the time it takes to gather (to avoid being too out of date, how subjective they are etc.
Typically they are based on some combination of GDP, life expectancy, literacy, education, phone lines, Internet penetration etc. Some examples include the Human Development Index (HDI), the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI), the Opportunity Index, the Technology Achievement Index etc. In general agree with one another (R ² ~ 0.8). More information can be found here. For this report we focus on just two, the DOI (since it is recent and covers more countries than most) and the HDI since it different from the others and focuses on the human condition.

...

• Except for Mongolia - which shows average results - all East Asian countries show good (or acceptable) Internet performance. The trends show that these results are continuing to improve.
  • Results as seen internationally are strongly influenced by the condition of the network within the country.
    • This was confirmed by the step changes seen in performance in 2005/2006 when an Internet Exchange Router was setup connecting the ISPs of Mongolia.
    • Nearly all results are skewed by the performance observed for the last few hops.
• Improvements (/changes) in the national backbones - as in the case of Mongolia in 2005 - result in step changes in Internet performance.
• Internet performance is closely tied with Human Development Indices - HDI.
  • This is evident from the strong correlation of these parameters with Internet performance metrics as observed by PingER. In the case of East Asia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan show good Internet performance results while maintaining high values for HDI. On the other hand, Mongolia shows average (and in some cases below average) Internet performance statistics while maintaining average HDI values.
• Generally the traffic is routed via optimal links. However, traffic for some destinations are routed indirectly even though shorter paths exist (which are used for traffic in general). This may be attributed to the BGP policies defined by the ISPs.
• Increase in PingER coverage results in accurate results. This is observed by the increased correlation of PingER results with Human Development Indices over the years 2006 and 2007.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all our collaborative partners in East Asia maintaining monitoring nodes which enabled us to conduct this study. The contact persons are Henry Wong (Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Eng., Hong Kong Univ. of Sci. and Tech.), C. S. Hong and Obaid Amin (Kyung Hee University, South Korea), Chen Hesheng (Institute of High Energy Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Trey (National Center for High Performance Computing, Taiwan), Takashi Ichihara (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Japan).