ADSL

"Here, I’d like everyone to recall, what’s the essence of the “Straw Strategy”? Exactly, it’s “starting with something that seems to have little value.” It was precisely for this reason that President Son intentionally ventured into the ADSL market. As a result, he immediately gained 5 million users. There were very few companies that could compete with such a market share. Ordinary companies only had 20,000 to 30,000 users, so having 5 million users was an overwhelming advantage at the time."

"Actually, when the president said he wanted to enter the ADSL field, I was very much against it. At the time, I strongly advocated, “The profit in this industry is not very high, just give it up.” But for some reason, the president finally said, “In that case, this task is up to you.” As a result, I had no choice but to take on the task. But later, I realized that my thinking was completely wrong. Because the president had foresight; he didn’t reveal everything at the start, perhaps to avoid complications. I believe that in the president’s eyes, from the beginning, he already saw this as the closest and fastest path to achieving the goal."

"And there were no standards. Most consumer electronics work no matter where you buy them, but if you bought a cable modem in New York, there was no guarantee it would work in New Jersey, because each cable operator’s architecture was different, and each cable modem sent different amounts of data upstream and downstream. Just as MPEG-2 was the language for digital compression of video, this new platform begged for a similar standard that every supplier could build on. At the CableLabs board meeting on November 30, 1995, although the agenda was packed, I had only one thing on my mind: high-speed cable modems. Urgency was needed because cable operators, working on their own, could not possibly scale this new service quickly enough. Already the local phone companies were preparing to roll out a new ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) service at 10 Mbps data transmission on the existing copper wire telephone lines to homes—but almost all of it downstream."