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The Third Fool; Pioneers: A tiny German outfit seeks to extend the Internet to Pyongyang, which is not quite ready for it.(Gunter Unterbeck to provide North Korea with Internet service)(Cover Story)
Byline: Ron Gluckman
Gunter Unterbeck's eyes mist as he describes an outsourcing market that really excites the imagination. Skills are high, labor cheaper than in India or China. Best of all, Unterbeck seems to have this dreamland all to himself. The only downside: it's North Korea.
Unterbeck has unusually warm ties to the isolated dictatorship, where he lived for two years as an exchange student from East Germany in the 1970s. He also spent more than a decade there as a diplomat. He insists there's a smart case for Internet business in North Korea: "You have hundreds of trained computer programmers, and they're really good. Already they are doing programming for Japan and Korea, but that's only the start. We could use their skills on special projects like film digitalization for anyone."
Unterbeck is betting on it. He is vice president of KCC Europe, a firm founded by a fellow German, Jan Holtermann, to deliver Internet service to North Korea. Holtermann first visited the country in 2000, when he helped arrange a tour by German musicians. One gig led to another, and in January he announced a contract to provide Internet service in partnership with the state-run Korea Computer Center. The Germans have since invested an estimated $1 million in computer equipment and a satellite link to Internet servers in Berlin. The link works, but so far Pyongyang has not yet opened it to the public.
Why wait? North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has said that the three great fools of the 21st century are smokers, those who don't appreciate music and those who don't understand computers. He astonished the then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright at the end of her 2000 visit to the DPRK by asking for her e-mail. Few people even realized North Korea had e-mail. It did, but only over phone lines reserved for the Pyongyang elite.
Pyongyang has so far provided average North Koreans with a walled-off Net typical of its obsession with "self-sufficiency." In 1990 it set up the Korea Computer Center, which has created a national "intranet" much like the closed networks of big corporations. I was given a rare peek at this Kwangmyong ...
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