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."

Comments

Re:Year 2010?

[rolocroz]

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?

They already own us.

[bl1st3r]

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!

But will that be fast in 2010?

[MurrayTodd]

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.

100Mbs Already Available in Japan

[doctor_no]

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.

160 billion...

[burtonator]

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!

So they're basically talking about...

[GrodinTierce]

Fiber to the Home. I wonder how this project compares to yesterday's story about FttH in Utah. And of course, will there be caps?

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)

Re:Year 2010?

[cfallin]

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).

50-100 Mbps sounds nice, but...

[Kufat]

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.)

Easy!

[SLASHAttitude]

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.

$2000 per person before overruns!

[billstewart]

There are 43.5 million Koreans, so that's rather more money per household, i.e. per connection, and maybe not all of them would want to pay that much if they had a choice. Also, a high fraction of the Korean population live in large apartment buildings, where there's a huge economy of scale possible (which is why so many people there have 10 Mbps or other high-speed service.) There's also a lot of rural and mountainous country, where that kind of service may not be realistic.

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.

Nationalization of industry not always good...

[altek]

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.