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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place?

I mean there are only a few ISP in every country. SK Broadband isn't small either it is something like 25% of market share. If I remember correctly Korean Telecom was 50% and LG was something like 15%. SK Telecom is also the largest MNO is South Korea. And if you are into hardware you may have at least heard of SK Hynix, world's third largest NAND manufacture.

Normally being a Korean conglomerate or Chaebol I would have thought SK must have some subsidiary competing with Netflix. But this doesn't seems to be the case here.

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> Normally being a Korean conglomerate or Chaebol I would have thought SK must have some subsidiary competing with Netflix. But this doesn't seems to be the case here.

Your guess is indeed correct! Two out of three major ISPs in South Korea operate their own OTT services (Wavve and Seezn). LG U+ is an exception and also the first major ISP to join the Open Connect Appliance program for the obvious reason.

Oh Thank You. Now it makes a bit more sense.

> My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place?

By having Open Connect Appliance network gives up ability to traffic engineer Netflix, which may decrease the leverage the network has with its peers or its transit providers.

Fundamentally, unless someone must peer with you (settlement or settlement free) and must peer with you on your terms ( locations, types of connections, etc ) you always want traffic that you and only you can control.

No matter what, SK Telecom is going to be eyeball (ingress) heavy and no amount of engineering of Netflix traffic is going to help with that, as it's all inbound anyway. Not that Netflix's upstreams like Level3 or Telia would be peering with SK Telecom anyway. Reducing the amount of Netflix traffic can only help.

Traffic engineering does not just cover what. It also covers where. At the eyeball network level where is way more important than what as what is constant.

I wouldn't be surprised if the normal bandwidth is able to be handled by existing connections, rather than the boxes with the ISP's. Is netflix super popular in Korea?

> Is netflix super popular in Korea?

Yes, from the article:

> The popularity of the hit series "Squid Game" and other offerings have underscored Netflix's status as the country's second-largest data traffic generator after Google's YouTube

Previously to Squid Game, I mean.

That too is true. As of March 2021, Netflix was the only over-the-top service that has reached 10M subscribers in SK (seconded by Wavve, currently operated by SKT and but only had ~4M subscribers at that time).

>Is netflix super popular in Korea?

Netflix made a few big splash with content made specifically for South Korean. Or K-Drama. But I dont have any data to judge whether they are super popular or not.

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