They did not have internet. From the article:

> You were in a country that really was sealed off from the rest of the world. No internet or social media. All press and TV (one channel) dedicated not for news but solely for the glorification of the Leader. That is the Kim dynasty and the regime.

Obviously the average citizen don't have Internet, but an embassy without Internet (most probably through satellite) is unthinkable, they need to be able to talk to their home government.

But if we go back 20 years (others have said this is written in the early 2000's), satellite communication was probably worse than 28.8k modems and really expensive, so yeah, it could've been there but only for official and not personal use.

> But if we go back 20 years (others have said this is written in the early 2000's), satellite communication was probably worse than 28.8k modems

I take it you are under 30 years old.

You've got all your timings wrong.

20 years ago Americans had no smartphones. Only some tech savy Europeans had Symbian phones.

I am sorry but this is not true, the Danger Hiptop also known as T-Mobile Sidekick series was incredibly popular in the US starting with the color version in 2003. By any definition it was a smartphone. (Also, Android is direct successor to it as Andy Rubin left Danger to start Android.)

I wonder how NK blocking their own internet from the outside world is the west punishing the NK civilian population.

Later on they talk about installing a satellite dish for diplomatic communication, so the embassy might have had some sort of internet connection over that.

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have internet but I know little of North Korea. They definitely didn't have smartphones as this was the early 2000s.

One interesting thing about NK is that they have their own walled garden intranet, only accessible from NK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)

Kwangmyong has been around since the latter half of the 90s, and is famously 'home grown' as a deliberate security feature.

NK also has some access to the regular internet, but it's very limited and tightly controlled. Meaning it is a luxury reserved for a few members of the upper echelons of NK society, or certain entrusted to people who need it for work (intelligence agencies and whatnot).

I might have given them the option to use their own OS (Red Star OS) at an approved location but I highly doubt they would have been able to do any actual work on it, especially nothing official.

I lived more than 40 years without a smartphone, believe me life was not a problem... The couple of years I used Internet before eternal September it was superior to what we have now.

I can see your 40+ years of experience hasn't prevented you from offering out of context comments.

The context being of the author's experience, who back then came from life in the West with (most likely) a "dumb" phone and a home/work Internet for browsing/email/instant messaging, and was then brought to a regime where mobile phones were most likely not allowed, and Internet might not be available, and social contact changed from being able to go out and see friends to having only a few people in the diplomatic compound, and contact with locals being severely limited to the people sent by the regime to watch over you...