[seoulmetro]

>Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?

Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds.

But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia.

Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.

[iforgotpassword]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806633

As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates.

I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke.

It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.

[seoulmetro]

The local variants of map apps are leaps and bounds ahead of Google Maps at any point in the last 10 years though. And that's not due to Google being restricted.

Google is free to do what it wants in Australia, but it still sucks pretty bad.

But yeah, SK software got sabotaged by people in power unfortunately. But the software also has some high standards from locals it has to live up to.

So it's stuck in a situation where the app is quite neat, but it will be as stubborn as a mule if it needs anything to spec.