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South Korea Plans National 100 Mbps Network
prostoalex writes "Korean Ministry of Information and Communication is planning to wire the entire country with high-speed 50-100 Mbps network. A total of $80.4 billion will be spent on the project that's expected to be completed in 2010."
This infrastructure will require amazing redundancy to truly maintain 50-100 Mbps throughout the country. If companies move server farms and whatnot to Korea, imagine the impact on the existing network. Obviously to maintain the said infrastructure it would require more money - and who's going to pay? And then the situation becomes what is the bandwidth coming out of the country? Fast bandwidth is not easy.
Why not just wire them onwards to consumers' homes?
Because Fast Ethernet switches are chump change, and fiber switches cost more than many people's houses.
Optical switches are designed for backbones, not connecting everyone and their dog. DWDM, Sonet and ATM don't easily (or affordably) scale out to many-2-many connections.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Err... Are you trolling or do you really not realize that there are two Koreas? The article is referring to South Korea--the republic with universal suffrage and a GDP per capita rivaling that of many European countries. It's hardly a despotic hell hole.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Fiber....
And if it weren't for NDA's, I could say more about how a certain large tech company (Samsung) is helping. I can at least point out that the new south Korean govt. has as it's IT Chief, the past and very successful Samsung President, Daeje Chin.
The country also is working to have full nationwide wireless network coverage by the end of next year. Cell phones can hop on when they can't make a decent connection, and computers can hop onto the cell net when a wireless access point isn't available. Right now, it's working and free in many locations, such as the new airport.
I'm amazed at the number of poor posts that get moderated up whenever there is a telecom related article.
/. Reader has a ADSL line and got lucky with no neighbors using outflow bandwidth and an ISP that doesn't care (yet), so therefor any nonsensesical pronouncement that would lead to the whole world having a service that now costs $5,000/month being provided to them for $21.95 makes perfect sense.
I just scanned through the two dozen that made a +3 or better so far and I'm astonished at the number of poor assumptions about physics, economics, network operations, and life in general.
The physics was the most egregious of the bunch and I think everyone who is smart enough to navigate far enough to see this *should* understand, but I can't resist brushing some of the others.
Moore's law is just an observation - its *NOT* a law. Why is someone applying this to available circuit speeds for WAN access? WAN access lines are very expensive and thusly that ground has been throughly worked by every telco equipment vendor - copper pairs are good for a about 2 mbits at the typical distance between a home/office and a CO, the next step up is DS3 delivered on coax (low loss, damned expensive compared to copper, and fiber refits in existing areas are crazy expensive. If it was possible high value DS3s filled with 672 voice channels would be the first thing going on some new wonder technology - this isn't happening, ergo it doesn't exist.
And why are they making statements like "100 mbit stuff is cheap on ebay, just build a national network out of it". Ethernet is a *LAN* protocol - 300' limit in most cases for copper, Cisco 2950-LRE are only good for a few thousand(hint, long reach ethernet == DSL), and who would want to manage a pile of crap from ebay? The number one expense in any network operation is almost certainly payroll and a crapola network guarantees 127% of revenue will be spent unfornicating it. If you want reliable service you pay for reliable gear. Once in a while you get lucky on the cheap but no business big enough to do a neighborhood size rollout would fool around like that, let alone a big telecom organization.
It seems to me the underpinnings of many of those posts are pure emotion coupled with a sense of entitlement - J Random
Mod me brilliant, mod me troll - the opinions of the readers are foolish and the moderators deserve a timeout for promoting such crap.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Almost.
You're talking about usage -- which is commonly oversubscribed -- whereas I was talking manufacturer's specs.
Nothing will piss off customers more than selling a 100-unit 100 MBps switch where you can't use all the ports to 100 MBps. I used to work for Lucent, and the CBX-500 ATM switch had that issue. I fielded a lot of pissed off customers over that. Backplane/midplane fabric speeds were closely watched among telcos.
You're right -- they aren't going to be doing a lot of 100 MBps sustained transfers.
I was trying to illustrate to some people why Korea doesn't go straight to 10-Gig E or faster. The problem is exponential.
As far as that "expensive" equipment not being expensive in 7 years...
Are that planning on STARTING in 7 years, or having it all rolled out? If the latter (like I suspect), the price of switches in 7 years won't matter because they will all be purchased beforehand and most installed by then.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
actually, sweeden leads the world in counter-strike, by teams like Schroet Kommando. the US is a close second with teams like 3D. (resource.) korea isnt really big at all in that game, but the most popular game there is Lineage. here in the US its actually close between counter-strike and bf1942, but i cant find a link for that. :(
traffic map of polish educational backbone. 10 gbit/s in most cities.
it may surprise you, but south korea is a rather modernized first-world nation. there are far too many cellphones, computers, cars, apartments with broadband connections, processed foods, televisions, radios, superhighways, paved roads, the whole country is electrified, has land lines, several airports, a modern banking system... don't confuse modern south korea with backwards north korea. just because you see that all koreans still farm with bulls instead of tractors, as evidenced by that recent james bond movie, doesn't mean that it's the truth.
this 100mbit connection is not for the network backbone. south korea's network backbone is already in the gigabit range: http://stat.nic.or.kr/network/m/2002/06.html (flash) http://isis.nic.or.kr/english/sub03/sub03_index.ht ml
although it's written in korean, the four things you see in the center are the national switches which also connect korea to the world.
this 50-100mbit connection is planned to be the average connection for the home user; average, in a country where the basic connection is around 2mbit. this does not preclude private companies from offering faster home connections.
Heh... not sure if this is real or a troll, which makes it a great troll if it is one. But one point about the Marshall plan: the money pumped into Europe mostly had to be spent buying stuff from US companies. (Classic "tied aid".) So there were expectations of payback. That's not to say the Marshall plan was a bad thing, but it was more enlightened self-interest than selflessness. As "for ensuring the world is a better place": [insert standard comment about South American countries fucked over by US foreign policy].