There’s An Obvious Way to Create More Jobs.

Fast, ubiquitous fiber can’t solve all society’s ills, but it can help with the problems that led us to Brexit. Just ask Seoul.

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With the highest percentage of fibered homes in the world, and fiber-connected cell towers everywhere, all kinds of digitally enhanced mobile wireless possibilities have emerged in Seoul. In a buzzy, overwhelmingly branded convention hall earlier in the week, I’d seen a government display of a virtual reality app for the exploration of city streets. And the February 2018 PyeongChang Olympics (motto: “Passion. Connected.”) will be the occasion for Korea to show off its world-beating 5G services. Whether you love sports or just like to tune into the world games every four years, innovations will jar your eyes and mind open. Think unlimited visualization of all possible relevant stats for any event, player-perspective camera views for the rest of us, and holographic visits by athletes to remote interviewers.
 

These will be made possible only because of Korea’s fiber lines: for the stupendous amounts of data generated by 5G connections to go any distance, a fiber connection will need to be about 160 feet away. (In order for Korea’s wireless marketplace to be competitive, that fiber connection point will need to be a neutral interface; more on that in a later column.)
 

5G won’t be a panacea for South Korea. There are genuine structural issues in Seoul that won’t be solved by technology. Like other major cities, affordable housing is a huge problem. Traffic congestion is awful — worse than New York City — and inequality is growing. As the mayor of Seoul, Won Soon Park, put it earlier this year, “Low growth is becoming firmly entrenched, drawing a deep, dark shade over our entire economy.” But with innovation on its side — Bloomberg says South Korea ranks first in the world as an innovative economy — South Korea hopes to use the new wizardry of wireless/fiber to create whole new categories of occupations (not just new jobs) for its people.
 

Contrast all this to the situation in Rome, where I am today. (Yes, I am taking a week off from criticizing our internet access problems in the United States. Let’s just say that we’re a long way from Korea.) As Elisabetta Povoledo of the New York Times reported recently, “Italy’s capital is a mess.” The transport system doesn’t really work, the garbage doesn’t always get collected, and the city doesn’t have a firm grasp on how much it owes its debtors. If you’re looking for hopefulness and ambition, you’d choose Korea over Italy.
 

Internet access? A tremendous problem for Rome. Italy was one of the first European countries to connect to the Internet in the mid-1980s, but today it has the slowest speeds in the EU. Rome’s recently-elected mayor, Virginia Raggi, campaigned on a platform that included universal Internet access. She has said that she’d like to “blend the outskirts with the center” of Rome, meaning she wants to address “all those areas just outside the centre that are deprived of the most important services, like transport, social services, cinemas and theatres.” And, presumably, Internet access. But few believe she can actually make Internet access happen for all: her lack of experience and anti-establishment bent are likely to combine to make her ineffective.
 

Again, it will take a lot more than technological tools to solve Rome’s problems. But the absence of effective governance and functioning infrastructure in Rome mean that creating the circumstances that could lead to genuine, thriving economic and social well-being is a far more difficult task here than it will be in Seoul. Last month, the world markets shook when millions of lower-income, less-educated, and rural Britons expressed their complete lack of faith in unresponsive government institutions that appeared to be doing nothing to help them; in effect, people who had little to lose voted to risk everything. I’m not saying that ensuring all these people had cheap, ubiquitous, unlimited internet access would have changed their view of their lives. But great political infrastructure is needed to ensure the existence of great, affordable communications infrastructure. In other words, the political strength and vision necessary to ensure world-class internet access would have been associated with better-functioning, long-range political institutions. And, perhaps, greater hope for the future.