Koreans are laughing at Mcdonnell’s 20th century plan
Pull the other leg, shadow chancellor, it has Korean bronze bells on it. Your British Broadband Corporation is nothing like the brilliantly successful rollout of high speed internet in South Korea – a very long time ago.
John Mcdonnell has claimed false paternity for his plans of sweeping nationalisation and monopoly broadband. He has also mixed up his centuries.
“What South Korea did is exactly this. They set up a state company and they rolled out full-fibre broadband over a 10-year programme and you know they’ve covered nearly 97pc of their country. We now have about 10pc to 12pc. We’re falling behind,” he told the BBC Today programme. Not exactly. The Koreans nurtured the private sector. They fostered maximum competition. The state company that Mr Mcdonnell evokes was actually the Korean Information Infrastructure project (KII) launched in 1995. It set targets and a regulatory regime. There was public seed money and aggressive use of subsidies. But its task was to lure private companies into the patriotic drive for full-fibre (and fast copper) broadband.
Fibre-optic penetration was a melee of competing firms enjoying public support but in cut-throat competition against each other, with open access for start-up firms. A policy of “net neutrality” was upheld to encourage minnows.
It is well-known that net public investment of all kinds in Korea reached 5pc of GDP by the late 2000s, the highest in the OECD club. It is less known that the Korean state pursued a rigorous campaign against “optimism bias” to weed out wasteful projects and white elephants.
The digital drive was not a headline driven electoral stunt. Public spending was calibrated with military efficiency and executed by a mandarin class, backed by powers that would never be accepted in a modern Anglo-saxon country. The philosophy was – and still is – “camping with your back to the water”. No failure is tolerated.
Korea carried out its feat and became world-leader in high-speed internet at the right historical moment. It is now rotating into 5G mobile – and 6G after that – for the next phase of global technology competition. GSMA Intelligence forecasts that 66pc of mobile connections will be 5G in Korea by the mid-2020s. It will be world-leader in that too.
By then we may be moving into a new frontier where 5G displaces full-fibre broadband for rural areas and ultimately takes over much of the digital traffic. Mr Mcdonnell’s £20bn venture – or £40bn? or probably £100bn? – might soon start to look like a spectacularly ill-judged gamble, the Hinkley Point of information technology.