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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 $80.4 billion will be spent on the project that's expected to be completed in 2010."
How very true. 7 years ago, the 1.5 Mbps connections that are commonplace today even in home cable modems seemed ludicrous for anything residential. By 2010, will 100 Mbps really seem all that fast? Granted, that's a pretty damn high increase relative to today, but will it really seem all that fast by then?
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Throughout their country, they have true 10mbit connectivity for most of its citizens at roughly 13$ US per month. That is insanely awesome when you figure in the fact that here in the US, we pay around 45$ to get at best 2mbit connectivity that peaks out at right around 140k most of the time. And thats just downstream.
While technology is increasing rapidly enough to make local network connectivity at extremely high speeds economically feasible for the first time, WAN technologies are still another story and lag behind by a few years. You still want dedicated 1.5mbit connectivity, you are STILL looking at around 800$+ dollars a month. (Key word being dedicated).
Good for the S. Korea!
hrrm.
Okay, for those of you already piping in that this isn't as fast as it can get, I'd like to see your present hi-speed home access push far over 1 Mbit/sec. Nevertheless, this begs the question:
In 2010 will 100 Mbits be considered fast or slow? Is there a "Moore's Law" for Internet access speeds? Back in about 1982 I was connecting to the local BBS with a 300 baud modem. A megabit download speed (today in 2003) is roughly 3000x that speed, and we're there after 20 years. That equates to almost exactly a 50% increase in speed per year. So if we go another 7 years at that rate, by 2010 we would consider 16 Mbit/sec to be fast.
Okay. I'm envious.
Murray Todd Williams
NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.
The best part is it's cheap,
They usually cost a little more than $40 a month.
Of course, it's still twice the price of 12Mbs ADSL lines in Japan like Yahoo BB who offers 12Mbs speed for $21/month. Most people don't know what to do with 100Mbs anyways.
While everyone is saying 'wow go south korea must be nice to have that kind of connection', consider the infrastructure in the US. We have multi-gigabit backbones crossing the US to many NAPs, and 100+mbit connections to just about every major city. And that's just the dedicated IP infrastructure, our voice-based and other private network capacities is many times that. The difference between us and them? We have to pay for ours directly. We have the freedom of choice, we dont have to wait for our government to decide how fast we should access our networks, and hence we bear the cost directly instead of indirectly. Just thought i would point that out.
Bush has so far wasted 160 billion on Iraq...
For that price we could have covered the entire country TWICE with 10Mbit Ethernet!
It's all about perspective man!
Down with Bush! Up with 100Mbit ethernet!
In fact, that's something that I've often wondered when I hear about super high-speed connections in other countries (like 100MB DSL in Japan for ~$30 a month). Is it only in America where we've let the industry cripple the future potential of broadband in such and insidious manner? (i.e. offering connections that can't really be used w/o having to pay extra)
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
I see alot of people out there thinking this is a lot better way to spend 80 quadrillion-billionty-thousand dollars than rebuilding Iraq. This is probably true. However, realize that all S. Korean citizens must serve in the military by law. I think it's only a two year term...but still.
Its not like this is the first residential 100 Mbps service in Korea. They're talking about wiring *the whole country*. That includes residential areas *and* rural areas. Do you see this kind of service in the Japanese countryside?
If you even skimmed the article before posting, you would have found that Korea is already the most wired country in the world - even ahead of Japan.
they'll probably put cat5 cables with 8 wires, which means the transition to 1000mbit will be easy.
Ethernet over CAT5 is restricted to 100m of cable between repeaters, so something tells me that they're not using copper Ethernet for a wide-area network. It's most likely fiber. However - I don't know much about fiber, but presumably upgrades would be even easier then (as long as you have the right type of fiber).
I have to wonder if download/upload limits will be enforced on this system. Think of what we get in the US with many cable ISPs and especially college connections: high speed, as long as you barely use it at all. There are 2-3 GB/month limits, in some places. Or, perhaps, they could charge by usage instead of offering a flat rate.
(There's no mention of this in the article, so perhaps they haven't decided yet.)
When you are that small it is easy to do things like that. I wish there was some way to get this here in the US.
OK, maybe it is spread over five years, but that's still the kind of pork barrel you get when something's being proposed more for political image than actual economics.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Look at the cases of the phone systems in Britain and Argentina when they were in a system of a welfare state (pre-Thatcher)..
So not only will the tech be outdated by the time they finish half of the rollout, but getting a repair to your line that got cut by someone digging for a new building will take 2 years at least...
Generally it's best to let private industry manage the "commanding heights" in an economy (power, transportation, infrastructure). History has proven this time and again.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Ahh.. the Senator from Ohio and a real live supporter.
You know, I could almost think about looking at him seriously.. until..
I heard him on the air on Talk of the Nation last week.
After a few minutes of his typical stuff, the host asks him point blank: Do you believe in Evil?
He literally hemmed and hawed for a bit, and decided that some people have different world views, and those different world views need understanding and insight to recognize and value properly.
But his essential answer can then only be left at no.
Listen to it on NPR.
I hope you dont support this guy for President, because at the end of the day, no matter who you want to win, it shouldn't be someone who fundamentally refuses to acknowlegde the presense of evil in the world. Evil people, evil actions, evil intentions, evil results. Evil exisits, and living in the real world dictates that you acknowledge it, accept it, and deal with it.