All Korea To Have 1Gbps Broadband By 2012?

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that while 60 Mbps may be enough to get us excited in the US, Korea is making plans to set the bar much higher. The entire country is gearing up to have 1 Gbps service by 2012, or at least that is what the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) is claiming. 'Currently, Koreans can get speeds up to 100 Mbps, which is still nearly double the speed of Charter's new 60 Mbps service. The new plan by the KCC will cost 34.1 trillion ($24.6 billion USD) over the next five years. The central government will put up 1.3 trillion won, with the remainder coming from private telecom operators. The project is also expected to create more than 120,000 jobs — a win for the Korean economy.'"

Comments

Botnets

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the botnet operators are furiously masturbating right now. With that kind of bandwidth, they could destroy anything they wanted.

Re:Botnets

[nlitement]

How dumb do you have to be to get a botnet infection? You have to be even dumber not to notice the increased network activity if you were infected.

Re:Botnets

[kohaku]

My servers are hosted in Korea, you insensitive clod!

Re:Botnets

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the botnet operators are furiously masturbating right now. With that kind of bandwidth, they could destroy anything they wanted.

Well, they could destroy everything in Korea, and Korea's trans-oceanic links. I don't think there's enough bandwidth to carry the entire DDoS from S. Korea across the large bodies of water.

There's always a bottle neck somewhere.

Re:Botnets

[crossmr]

Only in Korea. I can get 70000 to the local Seoul server on speedtest, but as soon as I leave the country it drops off significantly. It is one reason the Korean internet is so self-contained. Even going to japan cuts the speed by 2/3s, going to the US usually cuts it by 90%

Re:Botnets

[Anachragnome]

No need for botnets when you command an entire country armed with broadband.

"My fellow countrymen, you have fought well! Your Ancestors praise you honorable actions! Our next target will be www.whitehouse.gov !!! Onward, to victory! Commence DDOS!"

Re:Botnets

[repapetilto]

What do I need to do to monitor my network activity?

Oh sweet..

[Anonymous Coward]

Now their Zergrush will reach me even faster than before!

Re:Oh sweet..

[wpiman]

1 Gbps; man that is a lot of schoolgirl porn.....

Food for thought

[Taevin]

Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD. The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly 4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100 billion USD. If they were generous they might give 8% which would be about $200 billion USD. I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

The executives of those telecoms would get really huge bonuses.

Re:Food for thought

[Loadmaster]

Again!

Re:Food for thought

[stranger_to_himself]

Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD. The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly 4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100 billion USD. If they were generous they might give 8% which would be about $200 billion USD. I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

Putting money into an industry providing infrastructure people actually want and need while creating many many jobs across the country seems like a pretty good idea to me. Maybe that was your point.

Re:Food for thought

[Loadmaster]

It would be, but that wasn't his point. This was:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

They already did give 200 billion : http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

We (the US) don't even have one city with that kind of connectivity available for the public to use. Sure a few companies in each city have fiber access, but how many homes? We are getting chewed alive. Slovenia has faster internet than we do.

Re:Food for thought

[gad_zuki!]

Thats a fair assessment, but the US east of the Mississippi is a lot like any European country. Lots of cities withing short distance of each other. The argument that the US is too spread out applies only to the western states. I think there's a real problem here with broadband. At the very least the east coast would have 100mbps service to be on par with Korea or some European nations.

Re:Food for thought

[Rinisari]

Didn't the US.gov already do that in the '90s and we saw nothing out of it?

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way to think about it is that South Korea fits inside of Pennsylvania but has the world's 10th largest economy.

Of course they can distribute technology easily.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

They would pocket the $200 billion, jack up the prices, and leave things the (shitty) way they are right now.

Re:Food for thought

[Spazztastic]

For the readers who don't already know: $200 Billion Broadband Scandal

Re:Food for thought

[cayenne8]

Trouble is...it appears Korea (assuming South Korea) doesn't seem to have the inherit need to put extreme amounts of pork and other wasteful spending on their broadband legislation. Unlike the big, bundled travesty of the current US 'stimulus' package.

Break that damned bill into separate bills, directly target at the US economy. I'd back the part with rolling out broadband....it would help our infrastructure, as well as help create new jobs.

I can't, however, go along with some broadband funding bundled with some kind of 60's beatnik museam in SF and other crap we don't really NEED at this time.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

I totally agree with you. The whole "we're too spread out" thing has been bogus from the beginning. One only has to look at countries like Sweden which have lower population densities than the US but still have very high speed synchronous connections for less than we pay for a fraction of the service level here.

I might even buy into the spread out argument if it applied to truly rural areas. I could understand a telco not running $20,000 in fiber to one farmhouse. I can't understand why densely populated cities, especially newer growth cities, are still stuck with slow DSL and cable connections.

Re:Food for thought

[DragonWriter]

Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD.

If we assume that the costs would scale with land area. Of course, if you took South Korea, split it in half, and added an equal area of uninhabited desert between the two halves, you wouldn't double the cost; the assumption that the costs would scale with land area is ludicrous.

The actual costs would probably be closer to scaling with population, where the US is less than 10 times as big as South Korea, though that would probably underestimate things a bit because distance does have some effect.

I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

That depends how tightly constrained they were in how to execute it.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

Another way to look at it is that is only 100 times larger than South Korea and has an economy over 10 times as strong and yet can't seem to distribute even 1/100th of the bandwidth.

Re:Food for thought

[Ed Avis]

I'd say for wangling such a huge sum out of the taxpayer, they'd deserve to get a huge bonus. Certainly if I were a shareholder I'd want to handsomely reward any executive who could look after the company's interests so well.

Re:Food for thought

[fm6]

They'll get them anyway. U.S. corporate executives get bonuses when their companies are making money (reward for doing well), when they're losing money (it could have been worse), when their market share grows (keep up the good work!), when it shrinks (somebody has to make the hard choices) and most of all when they fire people or make them take lower pay (somebody has to watch the bottom line).

The problem here is not that corporations have too much money. I mean, Merrill Lynch paid out billions in bonuses as the company was facing a fatal tide of red ink. They even paid them early so they'd go through before the company was taken over by BofA.

The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

In case the point was missed, I was referring to this. I saw this article and was amused to see how closely the numbers fit to our friend the broadband scandal.

With respect to your comment, I can only point out that you completely missed the point. Of course it wouldn't work out quite like that (which is why I said "based on size only"). My point was that after investing money into such a project, even assuming 90% losses through inefficiency and corruption (which is ridiculous to begin with), one should then hope to have an increase of 10% of the proposed expansion. However, as we have seen, even investing twice the amount the Korean government is, we get exactly... 0% return. You don't see a problem with that?

Re:Food for thought

[FireStormZ]

That's a fair assessment, but the US east of the Mississippi is a lot like any European country.

So you're saying, for example, Kentucky (101.7 People/sq mi)is about the same as France (297/sq mi)?

"Lots of cities withing short distance of each other."

Look at New York state.. The second largest city (Buffalo) is five hundred or so miles away from the largest city. Now it might be fair to say the US eastern seaboard up to two hundred miles inland is the same as Western Europe but 'east of the Mississippi?

"The argument that the US is too spread out applies only to the western states."

It applies to everything away from the coast (east, west, and gulf) from the Ohio Valley to the Sierra Nevada. Now were the abandoned waste land that might matter but near half the US population lives in that area.

"I think there's a real problem here with broadband. At the very least the east coast would have 100mbps service to be on par with Korea or some European nations."

Im left to ask why? is this *really* a priority given everything else we are going through?

Re:Food for thought

[Shakrai]

Certainly if I were a shareholder I'd want to handsomely reward any executive who could look after the company's interests so well.

And as a taxpayer you'd probably want to hang them from the nearest lamppost

Re:Food for thought

[The End Of Days]

As opposed to the sense of entitlement displayed when people demand that public investment occur in non-necessary services so they can be further entertained? Or maybe that entitlement is more worthwhile because you agree with it... hard to tell really. Personally I find both repellent but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.

Re:Food for thought

[DragonWriter]

With respect to your comment, I can only point out that you completely missed the point.

No more than you did in responding to it. That is, like you, I was aware of the US broadband scandal, but I didn't realize you were intending to make an oblique reference to it. OTOH, the actual results of the US effort were in large part what I was referring to when saying the results in the US would depend on how tightly constrained the telecoms were in the use of the money.

Substantively, though, I think we're on the same page here.

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

Trouble is...it appears Korea (assuming South Korea) doesn't seem to have the inherit need to put extreme amounts of pork and other wasteful spending on their broadband legislation.

What's even sadder is that the whole thing isn't entirely an issue of corruption. Corruption would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is that our culture has become so bitterly divided into two camps that, in order to get any laws passed, you have to put something for each camp into the law.

You want any kind of infrastructure? Well according to roughly half the country, spending money on infrastructure is "communist", so you had better bundle that spending with "tax cuts" to make them happy. Oh, but now you're asking for tax cuts, and tax cuts are always for the rich, so we'd better include some "scholarships for low-income minorities" to keep the first half from getting upset.

Go back and forth a few hundred times until everyone feels like they're getting something out of the deal, and then maybe it will pass.

Re:Food for thought

[The End Of Days]

Considering that internet connectivity is better now than it was when the project that you so dearly love to link started, 0% return is disingenuous. Unsurprisingly, of course. I don't expect intellectually honest arguments on Slashdot. But still, come on.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

If shareholders held CEOs accountable for irresponsible and unethical behavior, we wouldn't be in the financial crunch we are now...

Re:Food for thought

[OrangeTide]

And as a taxpayer you'd probably want to hang them from the nearest lamppost

Yet we haven't done it yet. Maybe a desire to lynch the fat cats and actually doing it are two different things.

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

As opposed to the sense of entitlement displayed when people demand that public investment occur in non-necessary services so they can be further entertained?

Yes, because the Internet is just for porn and Facebook, right? It couldn't possibly be that it's being used for public services, governmental operation, and businesses both large and small.

And roads are just for joyriding in cars. Trains and planes are just for vacations. Electricity is just for watching TV and playing computer games. Indoor plumbing is for water balloon fights.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

You want any kind of infrastructure? Well according to roughly half the country, spending money on infrastructure is "communist", so you had better bundle that spending with "tax cuts" to make them happy. Oh, but now you're asking for tax cuts, and tax cuts are always for the rich, so we'd better include some "scholarships for low-income minorities" to keep the first half from getting upset.

That's a slight over generalization, I don't think anyone thinks infrastructure spending is "communist" so much as what it is that actually constitutes infrastructure and how to distribute it are hotly debated, and of course there are "sweeteners" in the bill too.

The bandwidth and rate of Korea's broadband is nice and I'd love to some something like that too, what's truly disgusting though is there are entire towns in this country that still have no viable option for broadband. There is a very real urban vs. rural divide. At the same time, even though the majority of the nation use cable or satellite TV, we're spending billions subsidizing the digitalization of TV, why don't we just pull the fucking trigger? Seems like maybe we regulate TV too much and don't regulate wall street enough. Even if the Verizons and AT&Ts offered up 1Gbit internet, it'd only be available in 3 fairly exclusive enclaves near a couple major cities.

Re:Food for thought

[Mr. Underbridge]

The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.

And a bonus structure where the fox guards the henhouse. Great idea, guys.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

If shareholders held CEOs accountable for irresponsible and unethical behavior, we wouldn't be in the financial crunch we are now...

Don't you mean VOTERS instead of shareholders, and DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS instead of CEOs"

To wit, with a nice video of DEMOCRAT Barney "There's nothing wrong with Fannie Mae" Frank:

Video: Democrats insist "nothing wrong" at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in 2004

By 2004, all of the elements of the current financial collapse had been in place for several years. The aggressive approach to enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) started under Bill Clinton in 1998, and the seemingly endless appetite for paper by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had turned massive amounts of bad loans into mortgage-backed securities to spread their cancer throughout the system. In 2004, a year after the Bush administration tried to tighten regulation and oversight on Fannie and Freddie, Congress was told yet again that disaster loomed. The Democratic response is instructive to seeing who really sat back and allowed this collapse to occur (via Power Line)

Re:Food for thought

[Nethemas the Great]

Smart***.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

That's like saying that internet connectivity is better now than it was before the start of the current Iraq war so clearly we've seen a return on our investment there! The $200 billion was supposed to get 45Mbps bidirectional internet connections to many millions of subscribers by 2006. Verizon didn't even begin rolling out its FiOS service until September of 2005 and had on the order of 10,000 customers by 2006. As of April, 2008 there weren't even 2 million FiOS subscribers. Oh and it's still not 45Mbps synchronous.

So even if we actually have seen some sort of progress and it's not exactly 0%, it's damn close. If you're actually arguing that far less than 1% of subscribers receiving 40% of the promised bandwidth is acceptable progress, perhaps it is not me that is making intellectually dishonest arguments?

Oh and RE your sig, "Randall nailed you privacy nerds", I dare say you might be missing the point. The security of a system is only as good as its weakest link, which almost invariably is the human element. In this case the encryption is sufficient to make the computer portion of information security too difficult of a target, making the soft human target much more efficient and practical. Of course, all this is assuming you can even base an argument on a web comic whose purpose is much more likely to make us nerds laugh and not "nail" an argument one way or the other.

Re:Food for thought

[kabocox]

Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD. The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly 4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100 billion USD. If they were generous they might give 8% which would be about $200 billion USD. I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

Didn't Clinton already give the telcoms billions in "tax cuts" so we'd have bad high width now? Your statement about land area is flippant at best. Why? Because we don't have to do the entire US. Heck, I live in AR, and I'd be thrilled to hear that in NY, LA, Dallas, or Houston that you could get 100 MBps at affordable to the average person prices. AR would be one the last states to upgrade. But NY, CA, TX, and FL major cities should have 100 MBps at cheap prices.

We don't. Every 6 months or so this issue comes up. What's worse is the state of our cell phone prices. Other places would have less than $10 per month due to competition. I'd be thrilled if any of those foreign cell phone companies came here. Heck, I don't even care if I had coverage throughout the nation as long as you could manage a single town's coverage at cheap prices. That's something that's impossible over here though.

It's one area where I actually don't mind city government trying to offer service. (It can hardly do worse.)

Re:Food for thought

[Thaelon]

No, it's not based on area. No, it's not based on population. It's based on local population density. The average density of the whole country isn't relevant, it's the distances between clusters and individual houses that matters, and you cannot accurately boil that down to a single representative number.

Re:Food for thought

[OrangeTide]

What's even sadder is that the whole thing isn't entirely an issue of corruption. Corruption would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is that our culture has become so bitterly divided into two camps that, in order to get any laws passed, you have to put something for each camp into the law.

Then we should just do nothing until both camps can come to a rational agreement that isn't a false compromise consisting of everything for everyone.

Re:Food for thought

[EvolutionsPeak]

As a taxpayer, I want to hang the politicians that coughed up the money.

Re:Food for thought

[Shakrai]

As a taxpayer, I want to hang the politicians that coughed up the money.

So you want to hang all politicians then? ;)

Personally I wouldn't advocate hanging. It's kind of nasty and in the United States comes with negative connotations. Perhaps we could bring back tarring and feathering?

Re:Food for thought

[jav1231]

Didn't Clinton give them something like $400b to expand broadband? By the time he left office not a foot of cable had been laid. There's a joke in there. It's the communications version of the "I wanna get fucked" joke!

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

Didn't Clinton already give the telcoms billions in "tax cuts" so we'd have bad high width now?

Yes, the last sentence of my post you quoted is a reference to the so-called $200 billion broadband scandal. If you browse through my comment history you'll see that I've been calling the whole "area too large" argument bogus since the beginning, but I too would be thrilled to hear we could get 100Mbps connections in major cities. I would then even understand if they couldn't quite justify rolling out tens of thousands of dollars worth of fiber to every farmhouse in America.

Anyway, I agree with you wholeheartedly. We're supposedly the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world and supposedly the leader in information technology and yet our communications network is just downright embarrassing when you compare it with other nations that have fewer resources and less of a head-start on the technologies involved.

Re:Food for thought

[the_B0fh]

As pointed out below - we *ALREADY* GAVE THE PIGFUCKERS $200bil.

Re:Food for thought

[fm6]

...but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.

And what, precisely, do all these overpaid corporate suits do? Besides grind their companies into the ground, then leave with huge golden parachutes when they finally get canned. There's simply no link here between performance and reward. If you have a certain kind of job, you're entitled to big bucks, even if you're totally incompetent.

I agree that an excessive sense of entitlement is a problem all across the board. You may find the ESOE typified by $50 TV upgrade certificates more irksome than $50 million dollar executive bonuses. But the issue here isn't what pisses you off more. The issue is what does more damage.

Those $50 dollar certificates aren't that big a line item, and arguably will even serve to stimulate the economy. All those overpaid executives who sweep in the rewards regardless of what they do is not only a huge line item (one-third of Merril Lynch's final year red ink was bonuses) it is destructive of the very marketplace that creates all our wealth. It's a kind of corporate socialism. I assume you're against socialism?

Re:Food for thought

[wclacy]

Many small businesses still haven't upgraded their LAN's from 100MB to 1GB. Wireless hasn't officially finalized a spec more than 54MB.

What would gigabit benefit a wireless home user?

This just sounds like wasted money. I manage a network with around 500 nodes, and when I moved from 100MB to 1GB across the board the users didn't notice much speed difference on the LAN. And the 100MB broadband Internet connection we have shared between our users works well shared between 500 nodes, even downloading large linux distros while streaming HD video to to multiple sites we have no problems.

Re:Food for thought

[rumcho]

Why should the "US government" do this? Do we not have private enterprise in this country?

Re:Food for thought

[MightyYar]

At the same time, even though the majority of the nation use cable or satellite TV, we're spending billions subsidizing the digitalization of TV, why don't we just pull the fucking trigger?

We, the taxpayers, made money on the digital tv transition. They auctioned off the bandwidth for billions more than the cost of the "subsidy".

I'm not sure what the solution to rural poverty is, but faster internet is probably not that high on the list.

Re:Food for thought

[MightyYar]

I can't understand why densely populated cities, especially newer growth cities, are still stuck with slow DSL and cable connections.

IMHO, the telcos were waiting for the FCC to rule that they don't have to negotiate with every little town, district, and apartment building in an area. I can't even imagine how expensive and hard to manage that must be. Not to mention time... you'd have to wait for exclusive contracts to expire. It took the cable companies 30 or 40 years to get where they are... you want to wait that long for fiber?

Indeed, now that the FCC loosened up the rules, you are starting to see FIOS pop up in big urban areas. I'm in NYC, and here each apartment building had a contract with one of the cable companies... totally insane if you are trying to compete with the established cable providers. And to pour salt on the wounds, the cable companies were allowed to offer VOIP phone service, but Verizon couldn't bring in fiber to compete with cable.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

Well you're correct that currently most home users have no need for a gigabit connection as they don't use anywhere near that amount of bandwidth. Of course, they can't anyway because it's not available to them. It's the chicken and the egg problem.

That said, you're probably right that with current usage patterns the average home user is not going to saturate a 1 Gbps pipe. I absolutely can see a family of four saturating a 100 Mbps pipe. That's 25 each and with filesharing and streaming HD video that 25 Mbps will go fast.

More to the point is the ability to handle traffic spikes. Even in the previous scenario, each member of the family is probably not using 25 Mbps constantly. However, what happens when there is a major spike and all of a sudden total demand goes over 100Mbps? Service degradation.

If the both the provider and home networks can theoretically handle 1 Gbps, the negative effects of traffic spikes should be significantly, if not completely, reduced.

Re:Food for thought

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

If we assume that the costs would scale with land area. Of course, if you took South Korea, split it in half, and added an equal area of uninhabited desert between the two halves, you wouldn't double the cost; the assumption that the costs would scale with land area is ludicrous.

Most people in the US live neither in densely-populated cities nor in the middle of nowhere. They live in the suburbs.

Verizon has ALREADY spent $23 billion on FTTP deployments. Evidently that would be enough to cover all of South Korea.

Re:Food for thought

[cthulu_mt]

Mine voted against it you insensitive clod!

Re:Food for thought

[srussia]

I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...

How about $2 Trillion to private financial companies in exchange for... what exactly?

Plus, your 1/100 figure is wrong by an order of magnitude (by population). Try doing the same extrapolation by land area with Canada.

Re:Food for thought

[Vancorps]

The state of Vermont disagrees with your assessment about dealing with rural poverty.

15 years ago the governor helped get massive funding to bring DSL to rural Vermont enabling thousands to improve their education and develop marketable skills. It didn't solve the problem completely but I am a product of that legislation which ultimately got me DSL in 1997 where my knowledge took off with so much at my fingertips. Telecommuting is also very common in the state.

I would say Internet access should rank high on the list of combating poverty everywhere as it gives people access to tons of information for free which would ordinarily cost them lots of money to get. Of course this can't come at the cost of libraries in such communities but the two are fundamentally linked at least in my mind.

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

IMHO, the telcos were waiting for the FCC to rule that they don't have to negotiate with every little town, district, and apartment building in an area. I can't even imagine how expensive and hard to manage that must be.

Properly managed, it shouldn't be that hard. Not an insurmountable challenge at any stretch. I suspect they already have managers that handle regions, to areas, and to cities and number of subscribers dictate. If it's too much to ask to deal with cities/towns individually, group them by area. Invite one or two representatives from each town and negotiate with them as a whole. You might find that this helps eliminate those nagging, trivial issues that have more to do with politics and egos than with real physical problems with the network deployment. I somehow doubt there would need to be much negotiation in the first place though. Are communities really going to start complaining if Verizon makes them competitive in the broadband service sector at no cost?

Not to mention time... you'd have to wait for exclusive contracts to expire.

This most likely applies to the cable running to the buildings, which the municipality likely owns. These contracts usually are in the form of "we own the copper but we recognize your contribution and efforts to get it there so you have the exclusive right to sell services on it." In any case it's irrelevant since we're talking about fiber, not cable.

And to pour salt on the wounds, the cable companies were allowed to offer VOIP phone service, but Verizon couldn't bring in fiber to compete with cable.

While this reads a bit to me like "oh those poor monopolizing telcos, not being allowed to make $15 billion instead of $12 billion," I agree that this clusterfuck of a situation is not entirely the fault of the industry. It's the combination of corruption, bizarre legislation, and blind greed that has lead to the current state.

Re:Food for thought

[Vancorps]

You are correct, although I get much faster Internet here in Arizona than I can in Florida where I just activated 4 3meg DSL lines to combine with 2 3meg DSL lines that the fairgrounds are providing us. I went from fiber Internet and Microwave here in AZ to DSL being my only option in FL.

I'm thinking about getting fiber to an apartment within Microwave distance from my location at the fairgrounds but it's going to kill me having such slow Internet. That's only 3meg down too, it's 384k up and that's just simply terrible.

Re:Food for thought

[ROU Nuisance Value]

nine-times FTW!!!!!

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

Rather than try to wire the entire continent, the U.S. should focus on 1 Gigabit for hose states with high IT industry, like California, Washington, Maryland, Delaware, and the New England states, because that's where the increase would do the most good. Maybe some of the State governors could do it themselves as part of their plans to create jobs, rather than wait on Congress.

=====
FASTEST EU/US STATES (avg Mbps)- Sweden(11),Delaware(10),Washington(9),Netherlands,RI,NJ,MA(8), VA,NY,CO,CT,AZ,Germany(7)

Re:Food for thought

[Taevin]

How about $2 Trillion to private financial companies in exchange for... what exactly?

Any argument about this is going to be wildly offtopic so I'll just say that one is to bailout some failing arrogant companies while the other is (or was) an investment in improving the infrastructure that is a major part of the economy.

Plus, your 1/100 figure is wrong by an order of magnitude (by population). Try doing the same extrapolation by land area with Canada.

Yeah? Maybe that should be a hint that I was referring to something other than population, say land area:

South Korea: 100,032 km^2
United States: 9,826,630 km^2
Ratio: 0.0101, or roughly 1/100

I can't really do an extrapolation with Canada because I have no data on such telecom investments in Canada. If you'd like to provide some, sure, I'll do the math for you. For reference though, Canada is actually a little bigger than the US with 1/10th of the population density.

Oh, and they have higher bandwidth too.

Re:Food for thought

[MightyYar]

Yeah, sorry if I came off as sympathetic to Verizon. I think they suck. Still, I can't fault them for being slow in running fiber to the home. It costs significantly more than copper per hookup, and then they are limited in the services they can provide. Definitely a regulatory nightmare.

Telcom/Cable need to be put on a more equal footing and recognized as information providers, not regulated separately as POTS and broadcast TV. That the cable companies can offer telephone and block the telephone company from offering television is a sad state of affairs.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>It couldn't possibly be that it's being used for public services, governmental operation, and businesses both large and small.

>>>And roads are just for joyriding in cars.

Yes but you drive to work, or ship goods by truck, at 65-75 miles an hour, not 1000. Similarly I can access gov't services at just 750 kbit/s - I don't need a 1,000,000k connection. There's providing necessary roads/internet at reasonable speeds... and then there's overkill. The proposed 1,000,000k per home connection is overkill, and just as silly as providing 1000 mph travel on roads.

The only way you can justify such insane speeds is because you want to download entertainment, and as the previous poster stated, that's a non-necessary service and therefore does not justify the spending of your neighbors' money.

Re:Food for thought

[MightyYar]

I'm not denying that you can blow a fat wad of cash on rural broadband an see some results.

I'm claiming that the return on investment is lower than other ideas that I've seen... as you allude to, education is pretty far up there.

While part of me is irked by the fact that those of us who live in the cities need to subsidize the people who live out in the sticks when it comes to power and telephone - and now perhaps internet, I also recognize that at least SOME people need to live in the sticks to grow our food. Far more people live in rural areas than are needed to grow food, however, so I'm not sure what value there is in encouraging more people to stay there by subsidizing their lifestyle.

Maybe we are at the point where BROADBAND internet is just as important to life as electricity or phone service... I'm just skeptical of this, that's all. I haven't seen any definitive evidence that putting in broadband improves people's lives more than, say, funding a local community college, learning center or library.

Re:Food for thought

[thetoadwarrior]

Why create a two tier system which will make it virtually impossible for some people to access bits of the internet and make it impossible for some states to increase IT businesses in their state because their connections are outdated?

There is no reason this shouldn't be done like what was done for phones and make sure everyone gets access.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

So what. If they are 1/100th of the size, then their GDP is probably 1/100th of the size, meaning the significants of the amount of money they are spending stays the same.

Or, maybe that's not what you are trying to say.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

>that's a non-necessary service and therefore does not justify the spending of your neighbors' money.

You must be new here.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, but close. i mean who but urban zones might want to get this speed, i think most of the home net users would be happy with a 15/30 Mbps stable line, no traffic limits/shapes on the line, this speed is more then enough to get a nice HD movie streamed to your home, even 2 if you need something else for kids, plus enough left for a VOIP line and some decent web browsing ...

so let that amount be spent wise, you got maybe roughly 200.000 places with that level of connection required in the US(including gov/mil sites), rest is spoilers...

Re:Food for thought

[JesseMcDonald]

The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them. No one else has any right or reason to get involved. If you think these companies are being mismanaged, don't invest in them; it really is that simple.

On the other hand, if you wish to complain about the tax money going to pay some of these extravagant bonuses, be my guest. You would do well to start with the original crime: the theft of property from its rightful owners. It hardly matters what the money is spent on, bridges or welfare or corporate bonuses; the injustice lies entirely in the taking itself.

Re:Food for thought

[droopycom]

I'd be thrilled if any of those foreign cell phone companies came here.

You mean like T-mobile ? The 3rd largest network in the US is headquartered in Germany....

They didnt do much better did they ?

Re:Food for thought

[drsquare]

Obviously not, otherwise the bandwidth would already be here.

Re:Food for thought

[fm6]

The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them.

Dude, the shareholders are as pissed off as anybody. The interlocking nature of corporate governance makes it impossible for them to have a real say in this.

Anyway, we're all a little tired of this libertarian ideological lockstep. This idea that private agreements are private business only seems to apply when it's to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. I'm willing to go along with it most of the time — entrepreneurs needs a lot of freedom to do their thing — but it can't be the last word in all arguments. Right now we're reaching the point where all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, and the economy is expected to function solely for their benefit. That's actually a kind of socialism. Not any kind Karl Marx would recognize, but it resembles all the old socialist states where the economies existed solely to benefit a small ruling elite while the economy at large stagnated. The only difference here is that the elite is a collection of private individuals, not some political cadre that waves a red flag. Though, ironically enough, the American right now also waves a red flag.

Besides which, do recall that many of the companies that pay themselves these huge bonuses are begging for government help!

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually I'd want to why my dividend wasn't a damn lot bigger and hang them from a lamp post anyway. These arses are looking after themselves - not the shareholders... and their boards of directors are so incestually mixed with other corporations that they're each mostly looking out after each other (and not the shareholders, the customers, employees, or the company's resilience).

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

You are indeed correct about Sweden having great broadband services. I don't think I could've put up everything that's happening in the USA right now regarding internet access and IT in general. Probably would've moved to canada or somethng.

Fortunately, I live in Sweden and am quite satisfied with my 100/100 Mbit without "p2p filtering", throttling, caps and other crap. All that for a monthly fee of around 20 EUR. Then again, I live in a big city.

In my last apartment, I had 10/10 for about half of what I pay now.
My parents live out in the bushes, surrounded by farmland and stuff, and even they got 24/8 or something.

Re:Food for thought

[cjb658]

I wonder how many Koreans actually use their 100Mbps of bandwidth as it is.

Do they have trouble with "bandwidth hogs" like Comcast claims to?

Re:Food for thought

[kimvette]

I could understand a telco not running $20,000 in fiber to one farmhouse

I cannot accept that - not when the telcos accepted $200bil to do exactly that.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast didn't let me have cable Internet until Feb 2001, after vaporwaring the city since 1996. Sprint had DSL in summer 2000, but it was available to about three households in the entire city.

I had Comcast high-speed from Day One, the awesome part being that this was then it was Comcast@home, which went under because they massively undersold bandwidth--I got regular download speeds of 7 mbps, and this was in 2001. Today, Comcast caps my modem at 6.6 mbps. Blah.

I remember hearing all the "500 cable channels" crap in the 1990s. *checks* Comcast has a total of 291 available here, and I subscribe to 72.

I think I've learned something about the USA: the private sector will NOT innovate if they are guaranteed either continuous bailouts or a government-enforced monopoly. Detroit, telcos, and cable companies: case made.

My neighborhood has electrical, cable TV, and phone wiring, all direct-buried, and making an appearance in a pedestal in front of every house. If, instead of direct burial, the original developer had simply buried conduit, it would allow future wiring [fiber] to be run without having to ditch-witch the entire street.

As an example: when Comcast came to hook up my house, the existing [not that old] coaxial run from my house to the street wasn't working. The Comcast guy laid some coax going from my demarc to the street pedestal, and someone else came later to ditch-witch it into the ground, meaning there's god knows how much abandoned coax under my lawn. If there were a 2" EMT run from that pedestal to my house, it would have never broken.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD.

I did some research and found S. Korea's pop. to be 16% of the US's living on 1% of the area of the US.

Taking the $2.46trillion then subtracting 16% (for population accounted for) i came up with $2.06 trillion for an estimate to due this in the US.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an uncle who works for an American corporation that never makes the news--in other words, they go about their business, make money, and remain in good standing with regulators, shareholders, and their board of directors.

He said that one thing his company has explicitly avoided is a "celebrity CEO"--i.e., someone who will command a much higher salary than a "non-celebrity" CEO, drive the company and share value into the ground, and take a golden parachute. Nope, their CEO is some guy nobody's ever heard of who does his job and gets compensated appropriately by the board.

Re:Food for thought

[Lars512]

The proposed 1,000,000k per home connection is overkill, and just as silly as providing 1000 mph travel on roads.

Look at the size of the US. If you had cars that could cheaply and safely travel that fast, then roads which could take such cars would be very useful. It would usher in a new age of transport convenience and hyperconnectivity. You could go coast-to-coast in, say, two and a half hours.

Maybe there is a large range of government services which can be more efficiently provided over such connections. Maybe the newly available private business opportunities and subsequent growth fills everyone's coffers. Surely that's the argument.

Here's a simple immediate non-entertainment example right here. I could be using Amazon S3 as a time machine drive for backing up my Mac, but my connection doesn't cut it. This sort of connectivity would enable it, and all sorts of new possibilities.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>Why create a two tier system

For the same reason why not everyone should buy a 500,000 dollar house. It's not affordable to wire-up everyone, including some remote Wyoming farmer, with 1 gigabit connections.

And it's ridiculous to claim some people don't have internet. They have phones don't they? Then they can certainly access 50k dialup, same as I do when I'm traveling.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>I could be using Amazon S3 as a time machine drive for backing up my Mac,

A $90 USB drive is cheaper. Just because you COULD do something, does not mean it's the best way. The $90 USB drive is immediately available (3-4 feet length), use a lot less electricity due to that short wiring distance, and is cheap to install (no need to dig-up 3000 miles of dirt from NYC to Calfironia).

In an age of environmental progressivism, we should be seeking solutions that minimize impact. The USB drive is that solution, not the 3000-mile 1,000,000 kilobit connection to amazon.

Re:Food for thought

[gad_zuki!]

>So you're saying, for example, Kentucky (101.7 People/sq mi)is about the same as France (297/sq mi)?

You cant cherry pick stats for your own disengenious argument.

Denmark is 22 people per sq mile and is one of the top broadband providers in Europe. 40 for Finland.

What all these countries have in common is good government. You can have all these broadband toys if you wish, but not with the current US system and the cronyism that comes with it.

Look at New York state.. The second largest city (Buffalo) is five hundred or so miles away from the largest city.

That's fine, thats just a fiber run. We cant even get intra-city communications to anywhere near 100mbps like we see in Asia or Europe.

Im left to ask why?

Its the cronyism. The population density excuse is a myth. Hell, why doesnt Connecticut have 100mbps? They have an ultra-dense 700 people per sq mile. There are NINE states more dense than France, yet here we are with shitty ADSL with DSLAMs several miles apart with no plays to deploy more or all the RST packets we can eat from Comcast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density

Re:Food for thought

[Garrett Fox]

Rather than handing tax money to failing corporations that then hand out huge bonuses to executives, how about letting failing companies die, cutting corporate tax rates, ending corporate subsidies and tax penalties alike, and trying something more like a free market than we have today? I keep hearing that "unfettered capitalism" is the problem, when "more fetters" really doesn't sound like a good idea. I'm against the kind of "free market" where the government confiscates a large share of all the wealth and redistributes it while presuming to "manage the economy!"

Re:Food for thought

[Lars512]

The $90 USB is probably less fault tolerant, needs to be actually carried around. No matter how much you might want to go with the USB drive, there's cases when you wouldn't, if you had the option.

I'm not advocating that everything needs to be on the cloud, but just saying let's not underestimate the types of services and business opportunities which would become feasible with those sort of connections. One result of such infrastructure could be yet a further reduction in the need to travel for work, which over a large population would have significant environmental benefits.

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

A USB drive doesn't have the advantage of being off-site, meaning it doesn't work as a backup in case my house burns down.

But none of that is really the point. The point is that having fast symmetric Internet connections would open up endless possibilities. In some cases there might be alternate/better solutions, but certainly the fast connections will be useful.

Do you really expect that businesses won't be able to make good use of a 1Gbps connection within the next 10 years? Because along with everything else, when you're building infrastructure like this, you don't want it to be "Good enough for now." You want it to be "Probably good enough for at least a couple of decades, and hopefully upgradable to whatever we'll want in a few decades when it's no longer good enough."

But then, I don't know why I'm arguing with you, commodore64_love. We've talked before, and I know you're just trolling.

Re:Food for thought

[Arterion]

If new services spring up from higher bandwidth, there will be exchanges of money. That money will be taxed. It will stimulate the economy. None of this is happening in a black box. You should be thinking about this as an investment by the governement, on which is will see a RoI greater than 1.

Government spending isn't always a loss that comes out of taxpayer pockets. If someone has a RoI over 1, then by gods, let's do it. Especially if it is going to benefit people in other ways, too.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

And roads are just for joyriding in cars. Trains and planes are just for vacations. Electricity is just for watching TV and playing computer games. Indoor plumbing is for water balloon fights.

Agreed.

Re:Food for thought

[drinkypoo]

Yes, because the Internet is just for porn and Facebook, right?

No, facebook is stupid.

Re:Food for thought

[Atario]

This has been true up till recently. The massive and continuing losses by the Republicans means people have finally figured out that the Reagan ideology ("Trickle down", or whatever you want to call it) has never worked. The citizens are way ahead of the politicians on this.

As Churchhill said: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.".

Re:Food for thought

[phulegart]

Actually the USB drive has the advantage of being copied a few times... one being put into the fire-proof safe, one being mailed to my cousin who keeps them all in that old bank safe he got at an auction... another goes into my safety-deposit box. Wow. Now, if the server that holds my data is flooded (as has happened http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2398916025034509084 ) it's gone if THEY don't have proper backups. However, by my making copies and sending them around, for that one time fee of $270, I get multiple backups in very safe locations.

Let's look at current Internet and home equipment usage for a second. A large portion of Americans are getting about 10m internet... most via cable, some via DSL... most DSL subscribers are at 1.5 or 3. Their cabled intranet speeds in their homes are 100m. If they are using Wireless B, they are at 11m. G, and they are looking at 54m. N, and they could see 300m. People are scrambling to have N up and running in their homes, when Wireless B will provide them with the same internet speed... as their wireless pipe will still be faster than their internet pipe. Are they using the blazing speed of N... or that Gigabyte network they set up? Not from the internet. This doesn't stop the demand for faster, cheaper home wireless. Maybe it's to prep for the time when our internet speeds are faster... but by then, the wireless technology will have improved as well, and people will STILL be clamoring for faster speeds.

Look at the majority of people out there, and how they are using the internet. Email, social networking, surfing, and watching legal streaming downloadable content is what is going on. And guess what? They are currently doing that at our current speeds. If that median 10m were to double, the quality of the streaming content would increase to eat up the bandwidth, websites would be even more content intensive (eating up bandwidth), email might and probably would become vmail, etc. All nice advances... but unnecessary ones. Sure, we can imagine what great advances would come about due to increased internet access speeds for all... but I'm noticing that all the great examples named are all based around entertainment and excess... not necessity.

We'd be better off getting a cell phone democracy started, where every citizen had a state phone, and instead of a house of rep and senate, we all voted. And don't be thinking that we'd be voting all the time. Our current house and senate spend very little time voting. Pushing for a national program like that (register to vote, get your phone... or register your phone) and the proper tech advances to make it feasible is a far better way to spend our time and money. Then just push for better wireless all around, and skip the cabled middleman.

Re:Food for thought

[sumdumass]

Are communities really going to start complaining if Verizon makes them competitive in the broadband service sector at no cost?

Sort of. Currently, most communities, especially rural ones get a set fee per subscriber on a line. If Verizon puts up telephone poles and rents/leases access to Time Warner, it counts those subscribers too. Same goes with underground lines but it isn't quite as much because it's easier to maintain the right of way for the most part when there are no poles. So if Verizon wants to install some tech that replaces two extra functions, then instead of getting broadband for free, the township, village or city will lose two thirds of their funding from the right of way and possible the funding from the regular service that gets moved. Time Warner wanted to put Cable down my road about 3 years ago and the township wanted $2.00 per customer until TW low balled them, started a trash talk campaign against the trustees and the township then asked for $3.00 per customer. Two of the trustees have survived reelection since then too.

So yes, they very well might start complaining if a significant portion of their funding is removed.

This most likely applies to the cable running to the buildings, which the municipality likely owns. These contracts usually are in the form of "we own the copper but we recognize your contribution and efforts to get it there so you have the exclusive right to sell services on it." In any case it's irrelevant since we're talking about fiber, not cable.

The FCC allows cable companies to negotiate contracts of exclusivity that even lock out satellite providers to any apartment building regardless of who owns it. There could be 5 different providers in the area and the Apartment building can be approached by one of them and agree to only let that one provide service on the property. I (me and my brother) have a rental with 6 units and to stop from having 20 dishes mounted and 200 wires being strung and restrung, we took a contract with Time Warner that gets tenants 25% off regular rates while living there. I have heard of of places that get no discounts to the tenants at all.

Things are fucked up. More so then I think you understand.

Re:Food for thought

[sumdumass]

That $200bil would only service 10mil farm houses in the middle of nowhere. And even that would mean neglecting all the outdated equipment and lines that prevented simple DSL service from being delivered in major population areas. The 200billl went to quite a bit more then just putting internet in the middle of nowhere. In some places, the entire infrastructure needed to be replaced, lines needed to be added and so on just to get the regular systems compatible. Then your looking at running to rural areas on top of that.

You need to be realistic.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

>Telecommuting is also very common in the state.

I >would say Internet access should rank high on the list of >combating poverty everywhere as it gives people access to tons of > information for free which would ordinarily cost them lots of > > > money to get.

I wish I could do that.

Re:Food for thought

[badran]

Just like mail was good enough.

Re:Food for thought

[Nutria]

For the same reason why not everyone should buy a 500,000 dollar house. It's not affordable to wire-up everyone, including some remote Wyoming farmer, with 1 gigabit connections.

Private individuals not being able to afford a half-million dollar house is radically different from a government-enforced policy of taxpayer-subsidized mansions for people in some states, and pay-your-own-way housing in the rest of the country.

And it's ridiculous to claim some people don't have internet. They have phones don't they? Then they can certainly access 50k dialup, same as I do when I'm traveling.

This statement highlights your total ignorance of

• modem protocols (you have to be within a certain distance of the "server modems" to get the full 50kbps speed, and "country folk" just don't live that close...), and
• rural telecom infrastructure (the gov't said the telecoms had to make have good voice-quality, and that's exactly the minimum that many rural phone companies did, since revenue-per-sq.-mile is so low they can't afford to do anything else).

Re:Food for thought

[Nutria]

kind of nasty

But cheap and easy.

and in the United States comes with negative connotations.

Only if the hangee has "a skin tan".

Re:Food for thought

[Nutria]

Do you really expect that businesses won't be able to make good use of a 1Gbps connection within the next 10 years?

• Yay, even more obnoxious Flash animations!!!!
• Lots of businesses have no or minimal need for the internet.

(My family's business sells building materials to contractors, most of whom are dirty and smelly and work out of their pickup trucks. Pencil, paper, a calculator and a cell phone are their appropriate technology. A "camera" smartphone and email would be a useful step up for them, but nothing more. Same thing with auto mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, restaurants, etc, etc ad nauseum.)

I telecommute, so a "fast" 12Mbps pipe (work laptop with VPN, "my" PC, and wife's PC all connected via router and cable modem) is tres useful, much smoother than the 7Mbps I had before upgrading my ancient DOCCIS 1.0 modem to a new v2.0 modem. But we happily survived at 7Mbps, without any undue burdens.

If Cox (our ISP), suddenly doubled our bandwidth, I'd cheer, and think better of them than I do now, but there's no way that I need more speed, and no way that I'm paying for it.

Maybe I'm just getting old...

Re:Food for thought

[kingturkey]

Yes, because the Internet is just for porn and Facebook, right?

No, there's Slashdot as well!

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

Wow you missed the point. (whoosh). You cannot wire-up everyone with gigabit connections. Some people simply live in locations that are too remote for it to be affordable. Does spending 1 million dollars to connect one lone farmer living in the middle of nowhere really make sense???

No. That's just a WASTE of taxpayer dollars. It might be worthwhile to upgrade that man's phonelines to handle 750k DSL, but that's about it.

>>>you have to be within a certain distance of the "server modems" to get the full 50kbps speed,

Yes and I've surfed the net at 28k analog speeds too. It's still doable, and still gives you access to the government websites or wikipedia or youtube or whatever. I wasn't cutoff from access.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>the types of services and business opportunities which would become feasible with those sort of connections.

Alright. South Korea and Japan already have average connections around 20 times faster than the U.S. or EU average (~100 Mbit/s versus ~5 Mbit/s). What new types of services have these superspeeds provided Korea and Japan which we Americans/Europeans do not have? If the answer is "nothing" then the upgrade is not necessary, because their superspeeds have not produced anything to justify the expense.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>there's no way that I need more speed, and no way that I'm paying for it. Maybe I'm just getting old...

Well said. I have 750k DSL and the only reason I have it, is so I can watch Heroes on nbc.com, or Supernatural on cwtv.com. If I wasn't watching television online, I'd drop back down to 50k dialup because it's cheaper. I see no reason why I "need" a faster connection than DSL other than to brag about the size of my pipe, which is juvenile.

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

>>>on which is will see a RoI greater than 1.

That's what the New York State Legislature claimed when it gave 24 million dollars to IBM to keep their NY factory open. IBM took the money, and then they closed down the plant anyway. That's how most government investments turn-out, with an ROI below 0 (i.e. a loss of taxpayer dollars).

Re:Food for thought

[commodore64_love]

I prefer http://splashface.com/

Re:Food for thought

[Lars512]

>

Alright. South Korea and Japan already have average connections around 20 times faster than the U.S. or EU average (~100 Mbit/s versus ~5 Mbit/s). What new types of services have these superspeeds provided Korea and Japan which we Americans/Europeans do not have? If the answer is "nothing" then the upgrade is not necessary, because their superspeeds have not produced anything to justify the expense.

Good question. I tried to do some quick research just now. All I came up with was this interesting report on South Korea's development of broadband. Although investment in ICT had taken place for years, it looks like some crucial investment was designed to pull them out of the Asian financial crisis, and succeeded in doing so.

I've been guestimating that the growth due to this infrastructure is due to new services and opportunities. Perhaps the bulk of the benefit is more mundane than that. Google staffers say that the number of hits for the search site is directly and significantly affected by response time (including latency). Improve response times by a few ms on average, and hits go up. Could it be that removing a second or two of load time on every site that you visit, for the entire web-enabled population, actually makes everyone more productive?

I'm stabbing in the dark here, but I'm sure there are tangible economic benefits. I just have no idea how you would begin predicting them, which would seem to be an important precursor for investment in the infrastructure.

Re:Food for thought

[hairyfeet]

Uuuuhhh.....you DO know that there are MANY areas where they would be damned grateful if they could actually GET 750k, because the telecos haven't bothered to lay lines in ages, right? When my parents built built their house nearly 30 years ago both the cable and ISDN ended a block and a half from their house. You could literally see the box from their back porch. Guess how far away it is now? That's right, it is STILL a block and a half away 30 years later!

Just like the fact that if it wasn't for the government rural electrification and water projects in the 1930's we would have many rural folks(and thanks to our telecos rural is a whole 4 miles outside of town) reading by candlelight and crapping in an outhouse, so too are we going to have to run the lines if we want our fellow countrymen to have access to even 750k. Because after getting together with the neighbors and even offering to pay for the lines ourselves and being turned down (they wanted a 60% profit on TOP of us paying for the lines UP FRONT before they would move an inch) I have come to realize that we simply will never have broadband nationwide in this country if the government doesn't run the lines.

And as an added bonus for all of us once lines have been run giving us all a decent pipe, then we can lease those lines to several competing telecos and have actual competition in this country, instead of what we have now, which is little monopolies that sit on their asses and cash the checks while everything slowly but surely falls apart around them. Because actually fixing things or adding capacity cuts into the quarterly profits, and we can't have that now, can we?

Re:Food for thought

[Nutria]

Wow you missed the point. (whoosh).

Then you did a miserable job at sarcasm.

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

My point is more that the uses available to us are somewhat determined by the potential available to us. You might not have a use for 1Gbps now, but there was also a time when 56k was *really* fast, and no one was even imagining Youtube at that moment. No one was expecting B2B internet usage of the sort we have today.

So what will someone come up with in 10-20 years that will saturate a 1Gbps connection? I don't know. Something.

Re:Food for thought

[nine-times]

However, by my making copies and sending them around, for that one time fee of $270, I get multiple backups in very safe locations.

I can sign up for online backups from multiple companies and have multiple backups in different locations, too, but online backups can easily be done in increments like, "every hour". Backing up to a new USB drive every hour and shipping it someplace every hour would not be easy.

Note that I'm not saying a USB drive doesn't have advantages, but depending on what you want and need, the advantages and disadvantages of an online backup might be better than the advantages and disadvantages of a USB drive backup. Plus online backup is just one thing made possible by faster Internet speeds.

Anyway, you're missing the point. I'm not saying, "Gee, everyone really needs a 1Gbps connection to their home right now, because they need to send that 3k email REALLY fast!" It's an issue of building infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be available, by which I mean that the issue isn't whether any given person is going to take particular advantage of it. I don't have to own a trucking company to make use of the roads, but trucking is an important thing in our country today and the roads need to be there for that. Roads are available to me and available to the trucker, and that allows various business enterprises to thrive. I can go to work, and the trucker can transport things. And in that sense, it's really not sensible for me to say, "Why do we have an interstate highway system? I don't use it everyday!"

So yes, not everyone is even making use of a DSL line, but it's not sensible to say, "Why should my neighbor be able to get a 10Mbps symmetric connection? I don't think I have use for that!" And frankly, it's embarrassing that there are so many populated places in this country where you can't get anything faster than dialup. It's embarrassing that you can live in NYC and still not be able to get a faster uplink than 512kbps.

And no, we don't necessarily need 1Gbps connections everywhere today, but infrastructure also needs to be upgradable. If they're upgrading it, they should go ahead and build it to be faster than it needs to be (within reason), and able to be easily/cheaply upgraded even faster in the future.

Re:Food for thought

[Savantissimo]

The phone companies do not spend much on providing consumer- grade ($100/mo.) data service. In fact, they turn a profit on essentially every line. If they show you numbers that say otherwise, look for the accounting tricks, such as inflated equipment "costs" paid to essentially captive suppliers.

Phone companies are not in the business of providing service, though, even when there's a profit to be made. Phone company executives are the most short-sighted bureaucrats ever to feed at the government trough, the pointiest haired of the pointy-haired bosses. They have no interest in upgrading infrastructure, upgrading old technology like twisted pair lines, or even software-configuring existing lines in a way that would improve service unless they can charge more for it. It's a dog-in-the-manger attitude - any degree of increased benefit for customers must generate proportionally more revenue regardless of how little it costs the company to provide the service. If they wanted to compete, they wouldn't be in the ILEC business.

The farmer-in-east-nowhere argument is a red herring. Nearly everyone lives close enough to other people to make providing high-speed lines profitable, and the tiny percentage that are unprofitable are not that expensive. The real reason it doesn't happen is that the phone companies still think that they should get eternal rent on old phone lines that the taxpayers paid for decades ago, and are willing to do whatever it takes to hide their crimes and evade any real oversight.

Re:Food for thought

[Savantissimo]

If shareholder votes determined company management or even board membership, you'd have a point. As it is,any shares not voted by stockholders are voted by the company management, and shares held through mutual funds and pensions are voted not by the beneficiaries/owners but by the fund managers. (That's in regular corporations - Google is worse - the founders' stock shares each have 10x the votes of the common shares.) Really stock is just an excuse for legal gambling, bank fees, and free money for top executives. Capitalization of productive industry in exchange for profitable public ownership is not at all the real purpose of stock - that's just what they tell the suckers.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not socialism. Its called Feudalism and we are rapidly making are way back to that system.

Instead of being agricultural slaves this time we will be 9to5 cubical slaves.

Re:Food for thought

[Savantissimo]

Our $200,000,000,000 mostly went to pointless meetings, extra layers of management, overpaying vendors who give kickbacks, lobbyists, new office buildings in already overbuilt cities, and, of course, buying nice things for telco executives' families.

Meanwhile there is still hardly any broadband in rural areas. The core network is still vast and empty, while the telcos still are trying to extort rents on the obsolete wires the taxpayers paid for decades ago.

Re:Food for thought

[thetoadwarrior]

The same thing could be said about phone or electricity and yet they've done or are you saying we should say fuck it to the the few remaining people growing food in this country?

Dial-up is nearly useless now. It will be beyond useless in the near future.

Perhaps they should say fuck it to farming so they don't get left in the stone age and you can be completely dependant on other countries for food. I'm sure they won't take advantage of the situation at all.

Re:Food for thought

[thetoadwarrior]

When the majority of our media and perhaps even phone communication comes through the internet that 28k isn't going to do shit. At some point they will have to be hooked up. The government might as well enforce it now.

After all the farmers were nice enough to allow them to run fiber across their land to hook up the east & west coast for selfish tits like you.

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ever see an overpaid executive trying to leave with a parachute made out of gold, by all means, let him go ! Being in the red will get a whole new meaning for him !

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Your calculations are way off the mark. While Korea is 1/100 the size of the US, its population is only 1/8th of the US. A similar plan covering only the East and West Coasts of the US (and maybe the Gulf Coast) will be only 10 times the cost of this operation - i.e., $250 billion. The federal government can easily put 20% of the capital, with individual states taking on another 20%, and rest can easily be brought in by the industry. Feasible, for sure.

Re:Food for thought

[sumdumass]

200 billion isn't that much money, what more would you have expected to be accomplished?

BTW, the wiring in the US, some of which wasn't even documented properly or in a universal way that could easily be understood by people from different areas, wasn't even in a digital format that could be used in planning computers and so on let along the quality of the wires actually known.

I don't think you understand the breadth of the task that was demanded. I also think that your blaming normal and common expenses in curing those problems as sink holes. Well, your right except that they were neccesary which you don't seem to understand.

Re:Food for thought

[fm6]

Heard an idea on the radio this morning: if a company wants to dole out huge remuneration to their execs, they have to go to the shareholders and get them to vote on it. Works for me. Free market enough for you?

Re:Food for thought

[Savantissimo]

Well $200B >= $670 for every man woman and child in the US at the time, so I'd expect a lot more than we got.

Your comment about the wire records systems is good, better than you probably know, in fact worth several books of mind-breakingly dull commentary.

Although it was in fact in a digital format, well several incompatible formats, actually, and didn't tell you much about the quality of wire, or even the length to better than +/-10%.

For the CO lines you had to run 1 Amdahl mainframe for every few hundred thousand lines - IBM wasn't IBM compatible enough for the 35+ year old software, and the Wang terminal emulator with really peculiar settings was a problem, and the passwords changing according to the lunar calendar was a bit odd, not to mention the need to know the two-letter wire center code for the old CO names that they used back when phone numbers were 4 digits...

None of that software got upgraded, either - just paved over for the nth time, and things sometimes would break under the paving. A thousand people have to know the ins and outs of every archaeological system layer to make it work in the US, and the telcos didn't even try to clean it up, but they did lay off most of the people who could run the whole spaghetti monster "by hand", so to speak,- better to leave a few lines broken than to fix it. After all, consumer data lines are just "best effort" which is regulatorese for "what ever you guys feel like doing".

Anyway, whatever they did with the money, it should have bought a lot more. They're quasi-governmental monopolies over a hundred years old. They know they can get away with just about anything -- no matter how much they steal, the politicians are never going to mess with them, .

Re:Food for thought

[rtb61]

No, the best way is to simply break it down into sensible portions.

1. Access
2. National/International Cabling
3. Regional cabling
4. Local Cabling
5. Connections
6. Back End.

Access can be quite simple defined as the conduit both major and minor put into the public streets for people to install cable and establish connections. This is where the government needs to focus it efforts, much like public roads, this conduit would provide access for commercially provided services ie. more than one company can put cable into the conduit and pay rent for the space the use and in turn charge for access to that cable. Other companies can do the connections to the cable ie. licensed local contractors. Other companies can then be involved in providing back end services.

So getting over that first hump and providing easy access is the important part. Companies can then wire up regions and compete for them as they choose, any gaps in the provision of services can be done by the government, paid for by the conduit access fees.

Federal, state and local governments are by far in the best position to provide the public space necessary for the conduit and local government already has sufficient expertise in laying pipe work (storm water systems etc.).

Re:Food for thought

[mpe]

And as a taxpayer you'd probably want to hang them from the nearest lamppost

How many "fatcats" can the average lamppost take though?

Re:Food for thought

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for share web site yapımı

Not "all Korea"

[elrous0]

I'm pretty sure the northern part would be happy to just get some food.

A map tells the tale better than words.

Re:Not "all Korea"

[should_be_linear]

In DPRK, they will let thousends of singing young people display image of broadbend internet server on stadium, using color tables. They can turn it into a car in 2 seconds as well.

Re:Not "all Korea"

[Murpster]

Silly hippie, don't you know commies don't count as people?

Re:Not "all Korea"

[LunarEffect]

These are my thoughts exactly. I was wondering if North Korea had become so insignificant to the world that people just forget about it and call South Korea "all Korea"...
Thats like saying "All of America" if you just mean the USA. oO"

Re:Not "all Korea"

[Bearhouse]

These are my thoughts exactly. I was wondering if North Korea had become so insignificant to the world that people just forget about it and call South Korea "all Korea"...
"

So long as they have nukes and a paranoid Gov. I don't think anybody important & intelligent is likely to forget the North Koreans, although I'm sure they'd like to...

Re:Not "all Korea"

[srussia]

Never underestimate the amount of Hotteoks that can fit in a SsangYong Rodius!

So is their price going up?

[SupremoMan]

I mean I doubt the telecom companies are doing it out of the warm fuzzy feeling it will make in their hearts. What will be the other side of this? Are they planning to offer on demand TV/Movies? Site to site teleportation? I mean that is a lot of bandwidth.

Re:So is their price going up?

[korean.ian]

On Demand TV/Movies are already here. With my connection, what happens is they play about 45 seconds of commercials (varies depending on size of file being streamed) while the settop box buffers enough of the file so that the rest of the file can download while you watch. I'm not entirely sure of the internal workings, but the file seems to stay in memory for 3 days. TV is usually free (except for the most popular shows, and then it's a very minimal charge for only the most recent episode). There is a wide selection of movies, from free up to about $3.00/movie (depending on the exchange rate). With pay movies you have 3 days to watch the movie, you can pause it and come back to it, watch it more than once etc.
This is a 100Mbps connection. For this service+internet I pay about $20/month.
I am not looking forward to going back to Canada.:(

Re:So is their price going up?

[yabos]

"I am not looking forward to going back to Canada.:("

But... we have Bell Sympatico with blazing 6Mbps speed and a 60 GB cap all the while being throttled on p2p!!!! Oh and if that's not good enough, you can go with Rogers and get a huge 100GB cap!

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

A network speed that meets Vista's basic internet browsing and e-mail requirements!

Re:Finally!

[Yaotzin]

This is getting really old, not to mention stupid.

Re:Finally!

[Ilgaz]

Just over a month ago, I installed Vista home basic to a guys laptop. The critical/security updates were 170 MB.

on an unrelated note...

[nobodylocalhost]

Malware and spambot writers everywhere are making plans to move their botnet hub to korea.

640K

[Anonymous Coward]

aught to be enough for anybody ;-)

Bah. Humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

Another country has something that's better than what WE have?!

Unpossible! They probably just stole it and, besides, WE would have it a long time ago if it was worth having anyway. And my uncle Mort has had this since 1983.

And they're socialists.

There. Have I wrapped up the usual Other-country-has-tech-not-commonly-found-here arguments here on /. ?

Meanwhile

[SRowley]

All of Britain's going to have 2Mbps broadband.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the 20th Century mate :)

Re:Meanwhile

[should_be_linear]

Obviuos solution: outsource goverment to Korea.

Re:Meanwhile

[drinkypoo]

All of Britain's going to have 2Mbps broadband.

You lucky bastards. This is the very best thing I can get, and lots of people can't even get that :/

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

50Mbps for 75% of Germany by 2014
This is already available in all major cities (including 160GB HDD IPTV receiver, 100 free IPTV channels and phone flatrate for about $80USD/Month)

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the Korean government plans to do some really heavy spying on the Korean citizens.

I think we are facing a Big Brother Gap! We cannot allow the Koreans to succeed. We must close the Big Brother Gap.

Re:Meanwhile

[chajath]

Glad to see you guys are finally over with that steampunk thing

Re:Meanwhile

[kohaku]

Actually, the network infrastructure in the UK is more than capable of those speeds already, it's just that all the bandwidth is being used for real time CCTV footage :-)

Well, I think you know the answer to that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Executive bonuses!

Re:Well, I think you know the answer to that.

[jgtg32a]

Insightful + Sad = Funny?

Re:Well, I think you know the answer to that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that "Sad"? $200 billion in new government contracts comes in while they're in charge. Sounds bonus worthy to me.

Re:Well, I think you know the answer to that.

[philspear]

Sounds bonus worthy to me.

For what? Being in charge when the government decided we needed better bandwidth? For having not already taken steps to put this type of bandwidth in on the company's own dime?

Must be nice

[hicks107]

I cant complain with my 10/2 fios, but 1Gbps sure would be nice. then again, a 1Gbps link doesnt necessarily mean 1 Gig of bandwidth.

Re:Must be nice

[PitaBred]

Maybe not to remote servers, but it sure does mean it to your local network. Which is key for P2P and other types of applications like that.

Re:Must be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, I really don't understand why these corporations don't want to invest in the technology to help users pirate free entertainment more effectively. It's shocking, I tell you. A true violation of the human right to watch any TV show at any time. Someone should invade.

South Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this must be only South Korea. North Korea couldn't get sneakernet to work, except for the Government Military Sneakernet.

Re:South Korea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Government Military Sneakernet may not be the fastest; but you'd be insane to argue with its JACKBOOTP suppport.

Re:South Korea

[elrous0]

Glorious Leader Kim Jong-il replies "We have internets! You don't think we have internets? Just look at our glorious internets! [holds up 50's-era telephone] See, our internets better than anyone in the world! North Korea internets way better than decadent, capitalist south!"

mmm

[areusche]

1 gbps. That sounds delicious! :D

Good for them, but...

[Tx]

...our ISP's in the UK, USA etc seem to be having real problems dealing with the bandwidth usage of their customers who have paltry 10Mbps connections. Do the Koreans not use bittorrent or usenet? Are these connections going to be capped or throttled? If the connections are bandwidth-managed, then it seems kind of pointless to have them in the first place. But if not bandwidth-managed, then I can't see how the ISPs can make it work. TFA sheds no light, so I guess it's just a rather pointless snippet, unless anyone can shed some light on these questions.

Re:Good for them, but...

[Phoenixhawk]

In the USA its more of a problem of greed, over-selling and business model.

While contracts have changed over the years, Mine with timewarner states it as being always on and always available.

For which I will be over charged a vast amount for my 10Mbps connection that will never really run at full 10Mbps.

So out of the box, they already broke their contract, (Yes I'm aware that the wording is more complex and they no longer read anything like the old ones that some of us still have)

Their business model is based on selling more bandwidth than they have because nobody will really use all of what they are paying for would they.

Even the biggest pirate, still only gets his 10mbps down and /512kbps up so if they sold what they really had in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

Personally over the years, my premium package has gotten upgraded over the years, and I believe it is supposed to be 20Mbps or something near that speed tests put it between 3 Mbps & 21 Mbps at any give point in time, yet anytime I download Its a freaking miracle if its faster than 500/800Kbps and on a happy day I see that coveted 1.2Mbps, while I can go to or remote in to work on their full lines and pull down from the same server to my workstation at speeds of around 3-4 Mbps

Re:Good for them, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy to shed some light on the situation.

1. Unlike US ISPs, Korean ISPs are *competent*. This goes a long way towards providing great service for cheap prices.

2. US ISPs are largely either monopolists are oligopolists. Why invest in infrastructure when you can just raise prices and pocket the profits?

3. If US ISPs took the money they spent on caps, forged RST packets, private ip telephony networks, and lobbyists, and instead spent all that money on infrastructure, every household in the US would currently enjoy Tbps service for $.99/ month with no caps, filtering, or other BS.

4. The US has "deregulated" the telecommunications industry. Deregulating entrenched monopolists is brain dead. The results are predictable.

5. In the '90s, the telecoms received $200B in tax breaks and subsidies from state governments to build, deploy, and maintain true high speed networks. The telecoms took the money, and then didn't build jack shit. Instead, they gave us pitifully slow DSL.

6. A general attitude among US lawmakers that "the free market will sort things out" despite overwhelming evidence that *there is no free market for Internet access*

I could continue, but I have some other matters I must attend to this afternoon.

Re:Good for them, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

b not B

Re:Good for them, but...

[fwr]

ISP's give preferential treatment to traffic to/from speed test sites, so what it says you will get is what you will get only when accessing the speed test sites.

Re:Good for them, but...

[timeOday]

...our ISP's in the UK, USA etc seem to be having real problems dealing with the bandwidth usage of their customers who have paltry 10Mbps connections. Do the Koreans not use bittorrent or usenet?

My theory is that once there's enough bandwidth for people to get all their HD video needs met by the Internet, the total amount of bandwidth required/used will level off. In other words, viewers' eyeballs become the bottleneck in the system, and those are not increasing in bandwidth exponentially. So while US/UK providers think they are looking into the abyss of infinite demand, I believe a symmetric 50 mbps (approx) service to every home would "solve" the bandwidth problem.

Re:Good for them, but...

[10101001 10101001]

A 1.5TiB drive would take ~3.4 hours to fill up at 1Gbps, best case scenario. In comparison, a 1.5TiB drive would take ~14.5 days to fill up at 10Mbps, again best case scenario. It's much harder to saturate a connection when you've ran out of room to put things. Even streaming content isn't enough to saturate a connection, as streaming content doesn't use nearly 1Gbps; although, if enough people decide to all watch a streaming show at a certain time there will be problems.

Connection rates will likely never growth at nearly the same scale of hard drive growth rates, but US telecoms sat on their thumbs as people began utilizing the internet to fill up the new massive amounts of hard drive space. Perhaps it was a lack of foresight on their part to not plan ahead to be constantly work to expand and upgrade their networks. Or, perhaps, they realized they were oligarchies in a time* when government was too pro-business to step in and demand that they not simply hand out profits but instead use them to help expand their networks (and hence the economy). In any case, it wasn't really an issue of telecoms not having the money or the technology.

*AFAIK, this was true during both Clinton ($200 Billion broadband fiasco, the failure of the 80MPG car, and failure in regulation of the two) and Bush years (letting Microsoft off, basically, and further failing at regulation of already existing projects). The fear these projects caused, btw, is mainly the reason why foreign countries and companies worked so hard on broadband and fuel-efficient cars. Funny, huh?

Re:Good for them, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've theorized that the American auto industry [all three of 'em] are eventually going to turn into government money-chewers. Congress will pretty much pay them billions annually to "not go under", not having the balls to tell their constituents "They're on their own now". Heck, they could even stop making vehicles.

If Obama and Congress succeed in raising CAFE or allowing states to set their own CAFEs, that'll be Detroit's real kiss of death in that direction. Even foreign automakers are STILL focusing on "light trucks", since they STILL need that loophole so they can make their vehicles as inefficient as legally possible.

Re:Good for them, but...

[baeksu]

I've never experienced or heard of capping or throttling of connections in Korea, and as far as I can tell, there is no port blocking or detrimental traffic shaping going on.

Koreans do not use that much bittorrent, though edonkey was popular until a couple of years ago. I have heard some people being fined for distributing copyrighted material over p2p, but the fines are relatively moderate (a couple of thousand USD at most), and they don't cut you off.

Koreans get a most of their streaming content for free from commercial operators. Buying digital media online is also pretty cheap. I believe the current rate for non-DRM'd mp3 files is like 5 dollars for 40 songs.

This is of course killing DVD rental stores, as well as bootleggers (though they do sell Chinese bootlegged DVDs where there's more foreigners).

Currently I can saturate my 100mbps connection only when downloading stuff from the main portal sites or the larger universities (KAIST Gentoo mirrors are crazy fast), or downloading stuff from Korean peers on p2p networks.

They are pushing more and more stuff over the networks (HD and VOIP), though, so 100mbps can become a little too slow for a regular household in a couple of years.

Re:Good for them, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the backhaul can't come close to coping with sustained 50 Mbps per end user. Most users now probably use between 10 and 100 kbps on average. We're in for some fun if people start watching as much TV on the Internet as they do broadcast TV now (and in HD to boot).

Re:Good for them, but...

[mjwx]

...our ISP's in the UK, USA etc seem to be having real problems dealing with the bandwidth usage of their customers who have paltry 10Mbps connections. Do the Koreans not use bittorrent or usenet? Are these connections going to be capped or throttled? If the connections are bandwidth-managed, then it seems kind of pointless to have them in the first place. But if not bandwidth-managed, then I can't see how the ISPs can make it work. TFA sheds no light, so I guess it's just a rather pointless snippet, unless anyone can shed some light on these questions.

The problem you have here is peering arrangements mixed with greed.

Peering: In Australia there are only 3 cables leading out to Australia, all very expensive to build maintain. This causes the cost of sending large volumes of data overseas to rise, seeing as we share a common language (except for the US, which did not seem content speaking English like the rest of us) so a great deal of our content comes from overseas. In Korea, they have no common language with other nations, whilst cultural influences will come from China and Japan a significant portion of the traffic on Korean networks was generated in Korea. Traffic generated from local networks is dirt cheap compared to what it costs to get data via undersea cables. In the US, lack of popper regulation amongst telco monopolies has created an environment where they are actively hostile to each other, in Australia ISP's are forced to peer with one another allowing them to share infrastructure, this de-monopolises the market and fosters competition as I can pick any telco operating in my area regardless of who laid the line (more often then not it was Australian taxpayers before the system was privatised).

Corporate greed: US Telco executives need to make insane amounts of profit to justify their existence to shareholders, this amount needs to increase each quarter and said telco exec's are unable to see past that quarter. Asian companies don't have this problem and are perfectly capable of thinking ahead and investing for 10, 20 or even 50 years which is why Asia's economies didn't go down the toilet like us westerners. An Asian telco will spend 2 million dollars now if it brings in 10 million dollars over the next 10 years, a western telco will refuse to spend the 2 million, take 1 million in bonus's and tell the shareholders that they made 1 million in profit.

I detest the fact that ISP's have to be given taxpayer incentives and backroom deals in order for their infrastructure to be upgraded.

Re:Good for them, but...

[AceofSpades19]

because maybe the korean ISPs aren't as greedy and actually spend money on building infastructure unlike american ISPs who try to suck as much money out of everyone as possible

Re:Good for them, but...

[mpe]

5. In the '90s, the telecoms received $200B in tax breaks and subsidies from state governments to build, deploy, and maintain true high speed networks. The telecoms took the money, and then didn't build jack shit. Instead, they gave us pitifully slow DSL.
6. A general attitude among US lawmakers that "the free market will sort things out" despite overwhelming evidence that *there is no free market for Internet access*

To have any kind of workable "market" it helps to have some kind of contract enforcement. Otherwise all you end up with are crooks who do little or nothing...

They've come a long way

[Anonymous Coward]

We civilized their country, gave them a booming economy, we protect them from their mischievous northern neighbor, and yet they still get into fistfights over how best to disrespect us and screw us over...

And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[hwyhobo]

Just because you pull fiber to someone's home and claim it is capable of 1Gbps, it doesn't mean you will get a useful 1Gbps. At some point all those strands of fiber are going to meet in a Central Office. How much bandwidth will they have on the backbone? What about their connection to other offices? How much bandwidth will the long-haul links have?

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[fm6]

Building backbone networking and central data centers is a lot cheaper than laying "last mile" cable. I mean a lot cheaper. It would be very strange if they dug up every street in South Korea to string cable, and then neglected the relatively small expense you're concerned about.

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you suggest they call it instead? Do you have a benchmark that you would like them to use?

As long as the customer is happy and the ISP makes a small profit, all is well.

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[Kjella]

Well forever it's been said the last mile is the problem because of the endless miles of ditch digging it'd take. Is there really a big problem laying a big bundle of cables point-to-point between centrals? Besides if they delivered 20% of what they claim before and 20% of what they claim now the increase is still the same...

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[rzei]

I doubt that it will much of an issue. Having anywhere between 10-100Mbps (up&down) up to what ever and making it really work at that level like a charm will open up a lot of potential to people spreading up around the country and creating jobs as they slowly spread..

I'd work from home, and even better I'd like to move over to a bit more rural area only if I could get a 10Mbit line up there.

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[meringuoid]

Just because you pull fiber to someone's home and claim it is capable of 1Gbps, it doesn't mean you will get a useful 1Gbps. At some point all those strands of fiber are going to meet in a Central Office. How much bandwidth will they have on the backbone?

Enough. Only one download has to come from the outside world; after that a swarm of incredibly high speed Korean peers distribute the torrent locally with enormous efficiency.

What, you thought people were going to use a gigabit connection for web browsing?

Re:And the *real* useful bandwidth will be?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much bandwidth will they have on the backbone? What about their connection to other offices? How much bandwidth will the long-haul links have?

Multiple OC-192, OC-768... what is the real problem here? All Korea needs to do is have massive uplinks between 3-4 big countries(US, Japan, Russia, Germany) and they will be fine.

What's the oversubscription?

[HockeyPuck]

Anybody know what these countries that offer 100/1000Mb to the home can actually deliver? I'm kinda doubting that Korea is going to have a 10Gb circuit for every 10 customers. If you had an apartment building with 100 units in it, do we really expect the ISP to be able to provide 100Gb simultaneously?

I just want to know, is this a case of providing high speed "last mile" but it's business as usual when it comes to oversubscription in the distribution/core layers.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Hadlock]

Does it really matter if all 10 users can get full 10 gigabit eithernet at the same time? Can you really think of any application where a home user would need 10 gigabit for more than 10 minutes at a time... per day? At that point your hard drive's write speed(s) become the bottleneck. Maybe down the road (10 years) you'll have users who can tap out a 10 gb connection 24/7 but right now with 5 megabit I can download video over bit torrent faster than I can watch it (at standard definition, 720p divx downloads at almost real time). I guess if you have 12+ family members each streaming HD video you might approach 1gb continuous but I'm not actually going to calculate that.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[HockeyPuck]

And then there's the problem of content? How many content distribution networks could actually stream that kind of bandwidth at a time?

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[PitaBred]

What about gaming? P2P for something higher quality than 720p DivX? Remote desktops? There are all kinds of things that faster networks enable, some of which are still being invented. Saying that the network is fast enough is like being an old farmer and saying your horse does a great job plowing, you don't need that newfangled tractor.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Chabo]

Well, at least it means that BitTorrent's local-user-finder feature (I forget the real name of it) will let you download off your neighbor at ~1Gbps, right? :)

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about gaming?

You can name a single game that demands 1Gbps under normal use? No? How about just 10Mbps? Still nothing? How about more than 500kbps? Still coming up short?

This isn't an "if you build it they will come" scenario. Unless you design something like a 1920x1200 FPS that sends complete video data to the client (as opposed to having the client render anything on its own), modern games, even the most bandwidth-hungry of them, are still many, many generations from even coming close to saturating a 5Mbps line, let alone coming anywhere near 1Gbps.

Going on your analogy, you're trying to convince the rooftop gardener in your apartment building to buy a tractor for his/her begonias.

P2P for something higher quality than 720p DivX?

You are aware that the General Public(tm) (so, not you and your torrent communities) doesn't sit around on torrents for TV shows 24/7, right? That they find it considerably more convenient to Tivo shows and/or watch them when they're airing on TV, right? Or buy the DVDs when they come out? And, in general, don't even care about 720p quality, let alone anything HIGHER?

Keeping your analogy going, now you're trying to sell a tractor to the guy in your apartment building who just has a zen garden.

Remote desktops?

Even FEWER people use remote desktops than torrent-leeching, and they're not doing anything via remote that would demand anywhere near 1Gbps anyway. Yes, yes, "if you build it they will come", blah blah, but if you have that much bandwidth to your OWN computer, why are you trying to remote desktop to some other one to do massively bandwidth-intensive work THERE?

One more shot at your analogy, you're trying to sell tractors either to people who have a few plants in their apartment or to people who grow their own organic carrots in the windowsill once in a while.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it really matter if all 10 users can get full 10 gigabit eithernet at the same time?.

YES.

It matters a lot. Otherwise its the same CF that we have in the US. Oversold capacity and inane rules that prevent users from actually utilizing what was advertised.

Can you really think of any application where a home user would need 10 gigabit for more than 10 minutes at a time...

Whether anyone ever needs more than 640 Kb is irrelevant, Bill...

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Mascot]

It's just in trial here so far, but the "test family" for my ISPs 1Gbit connection has so far managed to measure 920Mbit on it.

Unfortunately, the details are rather slim. All they say about the specifics is that they had a very hard time digging up a way of managing to utilize the bandwidth. My personal guess is they finally found a popular enough torrent to seed. Since they specified the test was done on upstream speed.

Of course, it's a far cry between a single family having it and them opening it up for their entire customer base. Currently the max they offer without having to get approval on a case-by-case basis is 50Mbit (up/down).

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Hadlock]

This isn't an "if you build it they will come" scenario. Unless you design something like a 1920x1200 FPS that sends complete video data to the client (as opposed to having the client render anything on its own), modern games, even the most bandwidth-hungry of them, are still many, many generations from even coming close to saturating a 5Mbps line, let alone coming anywhere near 1Gbps.

HDMI 1.3 is 4.9 gbps, which, I think, is uncompressed, but 1080p in its standard color bit doesn't use half of that. Multiple streams of uncompressed 1080p is the only thing I can think of that would saturate 10gb networking in the next 10 years. Those people are Dreamworks and Pixar and maybe some other movie studios. But I agree with you completely.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[bitrex]

Unless you design something like a 1920x1200 FPS that sends complete video data to the client (as opposed to having the client render anything on its own)

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[korean.ian]

Well this is what I get here in Seoul: Speedtest result here

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[thetoadwarrior]

Probably not but think about how much bandwidth most internet activities need and the fact not everyone is a pirate.

Even if everyone can't get 1gig at least the ground work is laid and it'll be much easier to get everyone to that point once the cable is laid.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[jez9999]

Wow, seriously? That's hilarious. These are my results. Your connection appears to be absurdly asymmetric; you have about 70 times the downspeed than your upspeed, meaning my upspeed is nearly as fast as yours. Doesn't that actually start to limit your downspeed, as the upstream ACKs can't keep up?

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

My 100 Mbps connection is actually 50-500 kbps.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody know what these countries that offer 100/1000Mb to the home can actually deliver? I'm kinda doubting that Korea is going to have a 10Gb circuit for every 10 customers. If you had an apartment building with 100 units in it, do we really expect the ISP to be able to provide 100Gb simultaneously?

I just want to know, is this a case of providing high speed "last mile" but it's business as usual when it comes to oversubscription in the distribution/core layers.

I live in Korea and I get fabulous speeds. Its not uncommon when downloading a movie that I can get 8Mbps (actual) or better. Of course, that depends on the source of the movie. If there are peers locally in Korea, it rocks! I can't wait for the new speeds to kick in.

Korea has had for years a bitchin' internet and they use it. A number of sites have tv series and movies available for watching great quality stuff in realtime.

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[korean.ian]

I've never had any problems. A properly seeded football match takes about 2-3 minutes to DL. I think the speedtest result is skewed because I have definitely seen upload speeds faster than that when seeding something (not just burst either).

Re:What's the oversubscription?

[crossmr]

The Seoul server is screwy. I can get faster upload speeds to servers in Japan or the US than I can to the Seoul server.

They are getting ready

[nobodylocalhost]

for the second comming of starcraft!!!

Re:They are getting ready

[Anonymous Coward]

for the second comming of starcraft!!!

Don't forget Diablo 3!

DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is clearly a cyber-warfare weapon. Korea will have a Weapon of Mass Cyber Destruction! That's probably a bad idea for them...

Motivation

[DoofusOfDeath]

There could be only one thing to motivate all of SK to pull this off: StarCraft 2 must be a bandwidth hog!

Misleading title...why?

[bogaboga]

"All Korea...?" I doubt. Does the author realize that Korea is made up of North and South? These are the same folks who think the USA is the best at everything; ignoring the fact that some folks in the so called poor world are doing much better than what here are doing in as far as health care is concerned. I mean Cuba.

Re:Misleading title...why?

[sribe]

I mean Cuba.

Ah yes, you mean a country with a repressive autocratic regime, where a single paragraph of mild criticism of the government can land a journalist in jail for 20 years. But of course you trust that government's self-reporting regarding its subjects' health.

Re:Misleading title...why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize leftists seriously praised Cuba's
"health care", I thought that was mainly an unfounded attack. Thanks for changing my mind!

I would say to get a clue, but I doubt just one would help you.

thats nothing

[nih]

here in the UK we will have a 'guaranteed' 2mbit by 2012!
hey wait a minute! ffs!

The 60mbps falacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Touting 60 mbps is entirely disingenuous since it's only the download speed. The connection is still a crippled by a 5 mbps upload speed. If the internet is to truly become the enabling force that it has the potential to be, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that people are consumers of information only and do not also produce information that they can share with the rest of the world.

We need to start demanding synchronous connections and the ability to run servers from our homes. And we need to get rid of the mindset that an internet connection's sole purpose is to get information from the internet. The ability to run servers from our homes is an important one, and not just for people like those who read Slashdot who are capable of setting one up. That's because once all internet connections are allowed to run servers, you'll start to see all sorts of products for non-technical people that utilize that ability.

Re:The 60mbps falacy

[Hadlock]

Running servers from home connections destroys pretty much all pricing structures for both intertube providers and dedicated hosting providers. If you want a dedicated (T1) connection you're going to have to pay ~350/month in most cities

Re:The 60mbps falacy

[delirium of disorder]

The ability to run servers from our homes is an important one, and not just for people like those who read Slashdot who are capable of setting one up.

Home servers are probably the only way to maintain a free and democratic society in a high tech economy. If we let the Internet become oligopalized and censored the way that TV and radio are, we will face a new era of corporate domination. When everyday citizens have control of the hardware that makes the Internet work, we will finally see the true realization of free speech. Concentrating our information and technology into a few massive datacenters makes censorship and control trivial. Only a decentralized, open network can empower the users, writers, reporters, developers, and other workers of tomorrow.

Home buyers' demands

[troll8901]

My friend says in South Korean, houses and apartments are frequently advertised with an emphasis on Internet broadband speeds and latency (fixed line).

Due to a respectable demand by home buyers to actually base their decisions with broadband as a major criteria. It appears that a respectable portion of the population are avid gamers.

These are for South Korea. For North Korea, elrous0 (869638)'s viewpoint is quite right.

Re:Home buyers' demands

[perp]

Posting to undo moderation error. Tried to moderate this interesting, which it is.

Re:Home buyers' demands

[troll8901]

You're sacrificing your mod points just for this.

Thanks. I'm humbled. You're nice. You really are.

The only other instance I remember is this.

All Korea?

[nick_davison]

Wow, that's quite an achievement for the communist North that can't even feed its own population.

Sure, not entirely surprising for the South, but an amazing achievement for all Korea.

Unless, of course, "all Korea" is a little more selective?

In Soviet Amerika: +1, PatRIOTic

[Anonymous Coward]

Government broadband YOU.

Obama bailout will soon tank.

Keep spending U.S. $ on your stupid foreign fiascos.

Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout.

WMF

[Yvan256]

WMF: Weapons of Mass Flooding.

Only 10%

[jgtg32a]

10% of 1Gb/s = 100 Mb/s

I'd take that

Huh?

[Dr Egg]

Currently, Koreans can get speeds up to 100 Mbps, which is still nearly double the speed of Charter's new 60 Mbps service

WTF?! SINCE WHEN WAS 100 NEARLY DOUBLE 60?!?! I DEMAND PROOF!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also asynchronous, not 60 down 10 (or whatever) up. So in pure bandwidth terms it's nearer 3x.

Re:Huh?

[thetoadwarrior]

Nearly doesn't not mean exactly and 100 is close enough to 120, imo, to be nearly double.

economist article on broadband

[qw0ntum]

The Economist this week has an interesting article on subsidized broadband and its economic impact:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13024563

I do not necessarily agree or disagree with the opinions presented within the article; I just think it is an interesting and timely take on the topic.

Re:economist article on broadband

[Locklin]

Interesting article. I find it humorous that they quote "would-be recipients" complaining that the 6B they are getting have too many "strings attached", but the article never mentions what happened last time they received money for upgrades.

Re:economist article on broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Just read that article, what a sham.
It offers NO facts of stats (jokes aside about statistics) to back up its conclusion that Japan and Korea havent experienced higher economic growth due to fast speeds.

It seems to have been written by someone with only a cursory knowledge of, well, anything relavent in this field.

However, it does bring up yet another uncomfortable truth about the disparity between Obama's promises on Tech, and what he looks to deliver.

Verizon is GPON

[thule]

Verizon is deploying GPON or Gigabit Passive Optical Network. The Ethernet port on the Optical Network Terminator outside my house is labels 1000Mbit. My area was lit 4 months ago. That means it was something like 5 years for Verizon to get to my area of Los Angeles... not for lack of effort.

It takes a long time to pull that much fiber.

Re:Verizon is GPON

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Lucky you. I'm in the San Fernando Valley, and still no word on when FIOS will show up here.

Re:Verizon is GPON

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure it's not "Gigabit Passive Optical Remote Network" instead?

Ah, soooo....

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything for good ping times for StarCraft, is it?

It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[rbrander]

Debate this one as you will, but, PLEASE, just this once, don't anybody write, "Of course Korea and Japan and Europe have better broadband than the US, they're all a big urban beehive, we're all rural and spread out."

Somebody says that every time the 3rd-rate US broadband comes up, and every time I or somebody has to point out that Canada is even more spread out than the US and has way higher broadband penetration. Some European countries with spectacular broadband offerings (Finland) have lower persons/sq km than the US has. (US: 30 persons/sq.km, Finland, 14.7, Sweden 20)

Now check out Finland & Sweden vs. the US position on this chart:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

Even Canada is way ahead of you, and two countries could hardly be more alike in their respective fractions of population in large cities, small cities, large towns, and small towns. We, too, have privatized, not government-run, phone companies, but we lean on them a little harder to compete with cable and satellite, and to invest profits, not keep them.

Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some.

Korea and Finland in particular have no ideological barriers to large government investments in this particular basic infrastructure, the way the US has no ideological barriers to large government investments in defense. The US is well-defended, Korea is well-networked; get used to it.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Korea is also better defended than the US.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Ogive17]

If Canada was just as spread out (or more spread out) than the US, population wise, most Canadians wouldn't live within 50 miles of the US border.

I'm not using that as a reason why the US broadband is so crappy.. hell, time warner just capped mine at 250kb/sec basically because they put too many homes on one line, and service is horrible. Of course service still sucks, now it just means anything I do download takes 3 times as long as normal when I let it run over night.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[rbrander]

It's not WHERE your population does its urbanizing, it's how much it is urbanized. The actual figure is 75% of the Canadian population lives within 200 mi. of the US border: but if we were EVENLY spread through that area, we would be totally non-urbanized and hugely expensive to network. (It would be less than 15 houses per square mile.)

The population of Canada is 79.4% urbanized (living in centres of >=10,000 population).

http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/canadian_cities.html

The population of the USA is 81% urbanized:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

The difference is not statistically significant to this issue; to whatever extent it is significant, the USA should have slightly better broadband than Canada. (Significantly higher average income, slightly greater urbanization, 10X the economies of scale for the more-centralized parts of the infrastructure).

That took me 4 minutes with Google. I could have avoided doing the work AGAIN if you'd done the same. I was hoping to avoid it by posting early and stupidly assumed that nobody would just flatly say my assertions were incorrect without bothering to do any research or math.

I don't know why I bother.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you are taking the population and distributing it over the entire area of the country... that is very misleading. Something like 80% of the Canadian population is essentially squatting at the US-Canadian border. What would be better is to take the population density of areas over a certain threshold of population... eliminating all of the area of the country that only has some outliers. If someone truly wants to live in BFE, they ARE NOT entitled to flipping broadband (nor are they in any other case... if you want it, pay for it).

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

This took less than 5 minutes with Google

Take a gander at the population density maps of the US and Canada:

http://www.canadainfolink.ca/DensityMap2001.jpg
I guarantee you that Gaston LeBlanc in BFE/Nunavut doesn't have 20mbps cable.
http://cohn.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/population-density.png

Maybe a better map would be an overlay of maximum landline broadband speed available per square kilometer. I doubt that Canada would fare as well as you presuppose.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[clarkn0va]

I live ~500 miles from the US border as the crow flies (Washington or Alaska). In a town of 3000 I have the choice of DSL up to 6 mbps, cable (much slower, but nobody seems to know), or 4 wireless providers up to 1 mbps.

Those speeds aren't stellar, but consider that something like 98% of the Canadian population lives south of me, and well over 80% live in bigger centres. It's amazing on one hand that my internet is on par with the US average, and on the other hand that it's so far behind what is offered in places like Finland and Sweden.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Canada is way ahead of you

You forgot Poland...

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[thetoadwarrior]

Believing that the US is too spread out is just making yourself out to be a corporate tool.

The US was even more spread out before the telephone and we managed to get everyone a phone and that's without much infrastructure existing (seeing how everyone didn't have a telegraph line to their home).

If you want to argue that there are more regulations and what not now. The government can easily tell people to shut and quit holding the US back.

The simple fact is that telecos do no want everyone to have broadband. Even with phones they pretty much despise helping those in rural areas.

When a phone line gets cut they more or less tape it together and, at least with Verizon, the only qualification for a working phone line is that you can make out what someone says. If there's static on top of that then tough shit even if it means you only internet option, dial-up is pretty much ruined.

Loss of phone service results in them coming out to fix it as and when they get free time even if that means going a week without. This sort of stuff doesn't just happen to people who live on their own and miles away from others either.

I don't think a lot of people realise how shit it is to be outside of urban area and how backwards some parts of the US are for something as basic as communication.

It's appalling and it is holding people back and when the internet becomes more important it'll puts those areas in poverty and hold people back from getting jobs making them a drain on the over all system and there will be no chance to spread the wealth as no technical company would ever want to set up shop in a place so backwards.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some."

An alternate point of view: Economists define certain utilities as being a "natural monopoly" which justifies government intervention. Meaning through one side of their mouth politicians promise ruthless regulation to ensure fair prices amongst other things and through the other side create restrictions on competition (violently enforcing the monopoly) and lavishing said monopoly with tax payer money giving them a not so natural advantage over the supposed none existent competition. It's a self fulfilling prophecy to believe that there are such things as "natural monopolies". It is also incredibly naive to believe politicians actually have our best interest at heart (whatever that means) and they only need to be persuaded to wave their big violent fists around in this direction or that direction and everything will be hunky dory. When they give such large sums of money to these huge monopolistic companies there is no doubt (in my mind at least) that they wouldn't be compensated for their oh so compassionate actions by the CEO's of these companies.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're well "offended", as in, we tend to go on the offense, especially when we hear that there might be an asprin factory in the middle-east making of all things, asprin.

If we cut the military budget by 10% and put it towards our network, we could probably have the best and fastest network infrastructure in the world.

At least Obama is more up to speed and understands that there is this "internet" thats for more than just "email".

Bush and previous presidents were technologically impaired, maybe our new leader will try to help us catch up.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada? Really?

Last time I checked Telus GPON wasn't even market testing yet, so that leaves the 10/15Mbit offering sometime next month, if you already have 6Mbit. If you don't have 6Mbit, you don't get 10 or 15, sucks to be you.

Meanwhile Shaw is offering much higher downlink speeds, and crap for uplink. Not to mention you get harassed by the Terms of Service Shaw Police the second you step over the bandwidth cap, and get kicked off if you do it too often.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some."

They're not monopolies unless your government makes them monopolies.

Your government makes them monopolies. Mine doesn't. In any given city at any given point in time, I can easily choose between at least 5 different DSL, cable or 3G providers, and many places are moving along nicely, getting the fiber option as well.

Your government says it's okay for individual companies to buy the rights to an entire city, and as such, you will always be behind due to lack in competition.

Re:It's not how much more spread out the US is...

[rbrander]

Sigh. I repeat, I don't know why I bother.

Yes, I too can choose from cable, multiple DSL offerings from different companies, and 3G services. Canada has all of that, perhaps you have us confused with North Korea. I'm not talking about that.

Look it up. The term "natural monopolies" means "natural", not "government created". It refers to things like road networks where putting in two of them would be prohibitively expensive; the infrastructure is only affordable AT ALL because it serves everybody. (Also, with roads, exactly where would you put the second competitive network so it didn't intersect with the first? All Underground?)

I work for a water/sewer utility; you can argue about privatizing us, but you can't argue that it would ever pay anybody to put in a second set of water & sewer pipes in order to compete with us. (total length of water, sewer & storm systems: 8400 miles; installation cost: $9 billion; number of people to spread this out over: 1M; cost per 2.5 person household: $23,000, or 19 years of its water/sewer bills. Then try paying for the plants. And our operations costs.)

I think you'll find that your 5 (or 55) DSL suppliers all use the same set of wires; I don't know of a city with two sets of phone wires all the way to the house. Your "competitive" companies can only be competitive within a narrow range of add-on services over and above what they all must pay to the telco that owns those wires.

The discovery that both the 1930's phone wires and the 1970's television cable wires could both carry internet did create a first: two networks to each house that can provide the same service. But, alas, despite the fact that these are quite different technologies and network problems and infrastructure ages, and SHOULD have had different prices, the price for Internet in most places with both DSL and cable is quite similar between the two. Both are, of course, charging all the traffic will bear, because only two competitors isn't very competitive. I believe economists are very skeptical of competive environments with fewer than six vendors.

Even if projects to put in wireless competition and a whole third network of fiber, were not routinely shut down by (privately-owned) monopolies (I don't recall any government-owned telcos doing so), they wouldn't be "enough" comptition to really establish a free market. (Yes...fiber is coming: but from your phone company to replace its copper. Still a monopoly.)

So...we're stuck with monopolies. They can be public, partially so, or wholly private; and they can be tightly regulated, even subsidized, or not very regulated. Different countries are trying different strategies.

And the US strategy is clearly falling behind those of many other countries. Even, yes, Canada.

I'm sorry, I don't want to insult your religion; I'm just stating economic and technical facts.

Not spread, SCALE

[illegalcortex]

It's not really so much of a "spread out" problem. It's a problem of SCALE. Any time you scale a project up orders of magnitude, you get problems. It's the same problem with large corporations and bureaucracies. You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.

Re:Not spread, SCALE

[TheSync]

.It's not really so much of a "spread out" problem. It's a problem of SCALE. Any time you scale a project up orders of magnitude, you get problems. It's the same problem with large corporations and bureaucracies.

I'm also wondering how many permits, environmental impact statements, and other NIMBYism would be encountered in a massive, country-wide trenching project.

Re:Not spread, SCALE

[Savantissimo]

You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.

With the telcos that CF is both the start and the finish. In between, to get anything done they will set up a department that can do everything, full of smart new hires with the authorization to whatever it takes to make things work. Then the larger system decides that this is a threat and the smart people are literally told to stop building and fixing things, six-sigma consultants are sent in, and the smart new people are fired to make room for the people in declining areas of business who have more seniority. It's all part of the cycles of, well not nature - but hierarch-ecology perhaps.

Meanwhile, in Spain...

[RazZziel]

... I'm extremely happy if I can get 6Mb/s (or 1MB if you live more than 3km away from the center)

This sounds like a bad Monty Python Skit

[KJSwartz]

Troll to 1st Knight Crossing Bridge: "How Fast is Broadband Service in Korea?"

1st Knight: "60Mbps, no, wait, 1Gbps"

1st Knight is "Magically" tossed from bridge.

Troll to 2nd Knight Crossing Bridge: "How Fast is Broadband Service in Korea?"

2nd Knight: "North or South?"

Troll: "I Don't Kno..."

Troll has now "Magically" jumped from bridge...

Re:This sounds like a bad Monty Python Skit

[visible.frylock]

Frenchman: Where'd you get the Gbps?

Arthur: We found them.

Frenchman: Found them? In Mercia?

Arthur: Yes.

Frenchman: Gbps are South Korean! This is a 2Mbps zone!

Arthur: The manga may fly east, or the JRPGs seek more censored climes 6 months after Japanese release, yet these are not strangers to our lands!

Frenchman: Are you suggesting Gbps migrate?!!

Arthur: Not at all! They could be tunneled!

Re:This sounds like a bad Monty Python Skit

[visible.frylock]

Doh. Guess those weren't the FRENCHMEN, were they?

Never liked this nerd license anyway.

So true....Not "all Korea"

[Simonetta]

The above comment is so true. This whole project has the odor of Asian 'group-think' about it. So before you call me a racist (and you will), let me define this concept.

The Koreans seem obsessed with the idea that they are as smart, driven, tough, and visionary as anyone else in the world, without exception. That is fine and well; it's good for them and it's good for everyone else. And for the most part it is true that they are as smart, driven, and tough as anyone.

But they are also a small nation, different and culturally isolated. They have a history of being crushed by their neighbors and suffering disproportionately for it. They have 1.2 billion Chinese to the West, 100 million Japanese to the West, and in theory 300 million Russians to the North (although there is a lot a territory between Korea and where the Russians actually live). They are surrounded by people who aren't concerned about the best interests of the Korean people and have been for thousands of years.

This affects their culture and even the basic way of thinking of the Korean people. Which is, to the rest of the world, paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change. They also tend to create a reality distortion field around themselves. This causes them to see certain things as far more important than they actually are. They have a tendency to confuse symbolism with reality.

So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic projects that have marginal long-term benefit.

Like this one. What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country? There might be some military advantage, but I can't think of any. The whole project seems like a 'pissing contest', a 'anything you can do, we can do better'- type of project.

Maybe I'm wrong. But here's a country that is split in half and the northern half is in the control of the most brutal and fascist dictatorship on Earth. This is country that has been on the edge of suicide for 50 years. And they don't have much hope of changing the situation in the next 50 years.

Maybe the North will implode when 'Dear Leader' dies. Maybe the North will launch their huge invasion of the South that they have been preparing for during the past 50 years. Everyone used to worry that a new Korean Civil War would suck the neighboring countries into a giant pan-Asia war. But that is unlikely to happen now. Chinese young people love everything Korean. Even the Japanese and Koreans have entered a era of mutual respect and peaceful acceptance. It's possible that the North part of Korea will enter the civilized world without a major bloodbath. But, since Korea has an obsessive, violent, self-absorbed, and fanatical, and quite possibly, mentally unbalanced culture, it is very possible the entire country could fall into a huge suicidal bloodbath while the rest of the world watches helplessly.

But not likely, the South of Korea makes a lot of things that the world needs. People have a lot of money invested there. It's not a place like Palestine, which could experience a final solution to its situation without having any effect on the rest of the world.

So, we should congratulate the Koreans in their latest accomplishment and huge infrastructure project. It's quite possible that we could learn a lot from their experience in wiring the entire country.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Shakrai]

They have a history of being crushed by their neighbors and suffering disproportionately for it. They have 1.2 billion Chinese to the West, 100 million Japanese to the West

Japanese to the West huh?

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Aqualung812]

Just keep going west...you'll get to it at some point. :)

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole project seems like a 'pissing contest', a 'anything you can do, we can do better'- type of project

We did that here too, remember.

"Last one to the moon is a rotten egg!"

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[FauxPasIII]

> So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic
> projects that have marginal long-term benefit.

-shrug- If I were going to start a company that could benefit from a super-modern tech
infrastructure and a tech-savvy and well-connected work force, this move would float
South Korea that much closer to the top of the list for where I would set up shop.

Would the economic boost be enough to offset the cost? I guess we'll see.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[bitrex]

Ultima Online makes so much more sense now.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant Weast

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[tknd]

What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country?

You can put all communications on it like voice (phone), video (tv), and data (internet). Internet storage services would actually mean something (1gbps can't be saturated by a single cheap hard disk sustained read). Thumb drives would be useless since you'd just put it on a server somewhere and for most purposes, you could access that data anywhere within the country.

High speed internet lowers the barriers to entry for content and data services providers. For example before the internet, you were stuck what was broadcasted or what was sent to you in the mail. So if you wanted to write your own articles, you'd have to get them printed on paper and distributed. Today you pay a small monthly fee and anyone can access your blog or whatever for essentially zero dollars. Marketing is still an issue but at least distribution and publishing are essentially zero. I expect the same to happen for other media (music, video) as internet bandwidth increases.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Anonymous Coward]

What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country?

People said the same thing about faster than 56k modem, 1ghz CPU, 16mb of ram, and 512mb of video memory.

And you sound like someone who never been to Korea, but making some ignorant statement about them from some small bits of reading/experience you had.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[kiyoshigawa]

So before you call me a racist (and you will)

You're only saying that because I'm white!

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

"Forget it. He's rolling." - Boon Schoenstein

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Anonymous Coward]

well, can you tell me a country where there are not Samsung's, LG's, Hyundai's etc...

what can i say, Koreans took examples from neighbors: from china how to produce cheap, from japan how to give good enough quality and from the rest the designs :)

example : ever wonder how come Hyundai cars look so familiar ?

setting jokes aside, South Korea I think , next to Japan is one of the most technological advanced country and this says enough ... rest they cam plan ahead for next 3 years, but who knows what technology we might get to use then ...

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[tastyfish]

Which is, to the rest of the world, paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change. They also tend to create a reality distortion field around themselves. This causes them to see certain things as far more important than they actually are. They have a tendency to confuse symbolism with reality.

I fail to see how South Koreans are "paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change." If anything the south has embraced a lot of US ideals such as democracy, capitalism, free press, etc. North Korea has been a dictatorship for the last 50 years and reflects the prejudices of it's leadership.

So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic projects that have marginal long-term benefit.

As opposed to the US? How about the space programs to put a man on the moon before the russians.

Like this one. What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country? There might be some military advantage, but I can't think of any. The whole project seems like a 'pissing contest', a 'anything you can do, we can do better'- type of project.

In South Korea you can literally stream live TV stations (KBS, MBC, SBS, etc) in HD to your PC. In addition to that things such as VOD, VOIP, mobile devices are popular. Perhaps it's just me but having 1 gig of bandwidth sounds to me like a sound infrastructure investment.

Maybe the North will launch their huge invasion of the South that they have been preparing for during the past 50 years.

They won't because of the military presence of the US and the fact that it would be in Japan's interest to support the US/South Korea. In addition to that I fail to see why China would support any attack on South Korea.

But, since Korea has an obsessive, violent, self-absorbed, and fanatical, and quite possibly, mentally unbalanced culture, it is very possible the entire country could fall into a huge suicidal bloodbath while the rest of the world watches helplessly.

Obsessive, violent, fanatical, mentally unbalanced ? I hope you realize that North Korea is a dictatorship and most dictatorships involve violence, fanatics, etc. South Korea is a thriving modern state just google some facts.

So before you call me a racist (and you will), let me define this concept.

You are?

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[khallow]

This entire exercise fails because you treat both Koreas as somehow being the same thing. They are not. And I ponder what you mean by "culturally isolated"? South Korea more than any of its neighbors is a mix of overlapping cultures. There's bits of Chinese, Japanese, US/Western, even Russian culture there.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[mqduck]

And for the most part it is true that they are as smart, driven, and tough as anyone.

And the other part?

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[korean.ian]

Who modded this insightful? Someone who's either never been to Korea, or been spurned by a Korean girl. Since this is Slashdot, I know where I'd lay my wager...

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[novakyu]

I fail to see how South Koreans are "paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change." If anything the south has embraced a lot of US ideals such as democracy, capitalism, free press, etc. North Korea has been a dictatorship for the last 50 years and reflects the prejudices of it's leadership.

For one, they are pretty xenophobic. Of all the developed countries, South Korea is one place where migrant workers are mistreated, skilled workers (such as actors) of foreign origin are not kindly looked upon, and even for the Koreans who live here, well, how many Koreans do you know that married someone who's not Korean (and his or her family accepts it)?

Their culture is a culture that celebrates suffering, grief, and grudge (look up "han", as a word that express a certain kind of emotion that Koreans like to claim as their own). Perhaps a good reason behind, perhaps there isn't. Either way, it will take many generations before they can become anything like the greatness that is America (in the generosity of spirit and leadership, for one).

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[crossmr]

What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country?

You apparently haven't tried to use the internet in Korea after school gets out.

...violent,...

If all you watch is Korean movies you might get that impression. On a personal level Koreans are quite non-violent and most try to avoid confrontation.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived and worked here in South Korea for six year I can confirm that they are in a strange way xenophobic. Very interested at everything that comes from the West at first, but after the first curiosity has been satisfied they simply do not care anymore.

I work for the biggest of the South Korean companies, and my (and all my foreign co-workers) salaries are about 35% lower on average than that of an equally-skilled Korean person. Of course, we don't know that when we sign the contract, so everybody leaves after one year. No wonder that they think foreigners perform worse than Koreans and thus the lower salary is justified.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[alecwood]

LMAO

That would be the America where everyone of every race and origin is treated with love and acceptance, where there has never been any kind of discrimination of any kind, and where migrant workers are loved like long lost brothers and sisters. That would be the America populated by people who know about the world beyond its borders, which doesn't have "World" series' for all kind of sports that exist only within its own borders, that doesn't imprison people without trial, that doesn't torture prisoners of war, that obeys the Geneva conventions, that doesn't have the highest per capita murder rate in the Western world, the highest incidence of narcotic abuse in the Western world, and the highest per capita prison population in the world.

Do please tell me where this America is, me & my Korean and Arab friends would like to visit for a vacation.

Re:So true....Not "all Korea"

[Lars T.]

I fail to see how South Koreans are "paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change." If anything the south has embraced a lot of US ideals

Too easy.

Create jobs?

[tjstork]

It doesn't "create 120,000 jobs". All it does is shift jobs from one place to another. If there is any creation of jobs, it will be in the follow on services.

Still, I'm all in favor of adopting more asian-like policies in America. Korea has a long list of goods that it tarriffs or protects against foreign imports of, and I think it is long overdue for America to do the same. Let them sell their Hyundais to each other, that's what I say.

Re:Create jobs?

[hwyhobo]

Let them sell their Hyundais to each other, that's what I say.

And let us sell Pontiacs to each other. Oh, wait, is that a new "Chinese Curse"?

Re:Create jobs?

[DragonWriter]

It doesn't "create 120,000 jobs". All it does is shift jobs from one place to another.

No, it shifts money from one use to another. Not all uses of money are equal in effect on jobs, so its quite possible it does create jobs. (Of course, lots of job creation analysis doesn't really look at the job losses, if any, from wherever the money is taken from, so doesn't really address net job creation; if that's the case with whatever underpins this claim, it may well be defective for that reason, but the whole oft-repeated-on-slashdot claim that government-initiated infrastructure programs categorically do not create jobs but move jobs around is completely bogus.)

Re:Create jobs?

[tjstork]

And let us sell Pontiacs to each other. Oh, wait, is that a new "Chinese Curse"?

It depends on the Pontiac. My 2004 GTO was a great car. Yeah, I know it is a rebadged Holden Commodore but the V8 and tranny are made in Michigan. Besides, I have an alliance exception. Aussies fought with the USA in pretty much every war we've been in since WWI, and fairly with the US. There's absolutely no need for Australia to a have sent anyone to Iraq but there's enough dead Australians from the adventure that I think they've earned the right to sell stuff in the USA.

Re:Create jobs?

[tjstork]

but move jobs around is completely bogus

It's not bogus at all. My point is that the statement "creates 120,000 jobs" is completely dishonest.

Unless that money is sitting in a room in the form of gold bars, then, a movement of investment from one place to another will have a net change in jobs. You might have more jobs for less money in one situation, versus, less jobs for more money in another, but, the overall size of the stimulus to the economy will remain the same from that act, although the shape of that stimulus will change.

The only thing that actually matters, for the purposes of genuine economic growth, is the size of the ecosystem that is created by the investment. Can someone create an institution that, creates a profit for themselves sufficient so that it allows for other profitable institutions to be created? It's a recursive thing.

WE have seen some massive federal outlays create very small eco-systems, but conversely, some small investments create very large and vibrant eco-systems. The new deal basically failed in this regard, but a few million bucks to make a smaller computer for a missile ultimately gave birth to fairchild, intel, and the pc revolution. So, I could say that if the government is going to invest in something, it should invest in building something that is a) new, b) capital intensive to research, but accessible to build, and c) useful to everyone. So, I would think that broadband is probably not the right thing there, because its something the private sector can already do. Still, there could be weird network effects of everyone having broadband as a right. It's almsot like, it you really wanted to jumpstart the economy, you should waive all the patents held by universities on research sponsored by the federal government.

Re:Create jobs?

[Chirs]

How about Canada? Have we had enough deaths in Afghanistan to qualify?

Is "sending soldiers to die for US-initiated wars" the new criteria for trading partners?

Re:Create jobs?

[tjstork]

How about Canada? Have we had enough deaths in Afghanistan to qualify?

Yep. But Canada also gets a special pass, along with the UK, for wading ashore on D-Day, (and especially for going ashore first at Dieppe) and because, for all intents and purposes, Oshawa and Detroit are practically the same city.

Is "sending soldiers to die for US-initiated wars" the new criteria for trading partners?

Yes.

Re:Create jobs?

[tjstork]

Really, what I'm talking about it, is, free trade among NATO allies, a movement towards a common currency between Canada, the UK, and the EU, largely because those states have a tradition of similar expectations of trade, have similar standards of living and law, and above all, tend to reject mercantilism. Asian countries do not.

In the short haul, I would say that if anyone in the USA who wants to lump Canada into the same category of trade as China, needs to be reminded of this:

http://web.france.com/files/legacy_images/dday5.jpg

Re:Create jobs?

[DragonWriter]

It's not bogus at all. My point is that the statement "creates 120,000 jobs" is completely dishonest.

The argument that moving money from one use to another cannot create jobs is bogus. Determining whether the statement "creates 120,000 jobs" is accurate relies on information not presented in this discussion, it may or may not be.

Unless that money is sitting in a room in the form of gold bars, then, a movement of investment from one place to another will have a net change in jobs.

Again, this is completely bogus. Not all uses of money (even excluding "sitting in a room in the form of gold bars") have equal effects on jobs. Different uses involve different direct applications of labor, giving them a different direct impact on jobs, and money applied in different uses also has different velocity, giving it a different less-direct impact on jobs.

You might have more jobs for less money in one situation, versus, less jobs for more money in another

Which means moving money from the latter use to the former use will, in fact, create more jobs, rendering your preceding claim bogus.

...and we're paying $0.20 USD for 100 bytes SMS!

[mwilliamson]

Why the hell are we still paying for text messages? Yeah, I know this is offtopic, but it's just freaking sick that the rest of the civilized world is much more forward thinking than here in the US in terms of data services. Why do we tolerate being the cell oligopoly's little bitches? This is f***ing madness.

Just what we need

[gujo-odori]

Just what we need, a whole nation of bots on 1 gbps connections.

Granted, S. Korea isn't quite the spam sewer it was in, say, 2000, but it's still bad enough that if you don't need to receive mail from there, you're better off refusing all traffic from S. Korea.

Re:Just what we need

[gujo-odori]

You think I'm a troll? You mods obviously aren't involved in the email security industry and have never been a postmaster. And/or you're S. Korean and can't face the truth about the amount of spam that pours out of your country. That does not, however, make my comment any less true.

Synchronous

[DragonWriter]

One only has to look at countries like Sweden which have lower population densities than the US but still have very high speed synchronous connections for less than we pay for a fraction of the service level here.

I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.

Re:Synchronous

[krenshala]

I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.

I think he did mean synchronous, as in SDSL.

Re:Synchronous

[Taevin]

Yes, you are absolutely correct. Symmetric as in same bandwidth upstream and down. Both words start with "sy," are infrequently used, and I've had synchronization on my mind all morning. Always proofread. :)

Re:Synchronous

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line

Re:Synchronous

[drinkypoo]

I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.

While you have been proven correct, the ideal connection is both. The internet is meant to be peer-to-peer. So is the web. More people would have their own sites if more people had useful upstream.

And with that 1Gbps

[Amazing Quantum Man]

The old people will only use it for email.

Re:And with that 1Gbps

[C_Kode]

...and their email attachments will be high def porn!

Re:And with that 1Gbps

[ninjagin]

Thank you, sir, for restoring my faith in tired, old, slashdot memes. I was waiting for it, and lo it was there! Better than hot grits on natalie portman.

Re:And with that 1Gbps

[dkleinsc]

Well, it wasn't quite right: more correct is

"In Korea, only old people use 1Gbps broadband to check email."

Re:And with that 1Gbps

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. And that article would be this one from few years back.

Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

N. Koreans are still resorting to cannibalism due to extreme food shortages, and being punished for doing so because it's embarrassing to their failed leader.

Re:Meanwhile...

[SupremoMan]

Seriously, who modded this funny?

Re:Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, because I will be vevvy amused when I feed him to the hungvy masses for carring me a faived leada, ror.

Kindest vegards.
Kim Jong Il

Good Enough for Me

[Anonymous Coward]

The KCC is giving a sweet deal to their people, but where I am KFC has an all right deal too. Today being Tuesday we have Toonie Tuesday, 2 pieces of chicken and chips for 2 bucks.

And then December 21 2012 hits...

[srk2040]

All that investment went up in smoke..

Re:Good for them, but... Let us not forget...

[davidsyes]

South Koreans consume LOTS of bandwidth just watching "broadcasting" and films/"pirated" DVDs. Probably there is little crackdown on at least the piracy of DVDs and related material because ultimately sales downstream probably depend upon or are enhanced by it. Plus, in the South, there are seriously dedicated gamers who'd probably put to shame just about any of the rest of the world.

The Bandwidth Capital of the World
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.html

Korea Broadband Archives (12)
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/broadband/korea/

Who Wants To Watch Full Length Movies On Their Mobile Phones?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080401/105208716.shtml

south korea, bandwidth
http://www.zdnetasia.com/tags/south-korea+bandwidth/

Until and unless US bandwidth consumers need or demand higher speed and quality and demand it for reasonable (to consumer, not to the execs/investors or excessive R&D or boondoggling) pricing, people here will just shrug it off.

Afterall, don't forget:

Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don't want it
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/two-thirds-of-americans-without-broadband-dont-want-it.ars

Most Americans without broadband don't want it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/poll_most_without_broadband_dont_want_it/

(Captcha: maleness)

And the problem is...

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Oh, yeah, we have this Congress which is elected district by district, so EVERY SINGLE BILL has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.

Don't blame Congress for this, the Constitution we have was designed for an 18th century agrarian society. No matter how carefully it was designed the resulting system cannot possibly be ideal for a modern 21st century post industrial society.

But cheer up, once the country has been misgoverned by this abomination into total collapse then the fascists will come in and fix everything.

Of course people could just wake up and realize they need to actually DO something about it now, but nah its easier to just sit on the couch, bitch about it, and have a few more chips and a beer.

Re:And the problem is...

[sumdumass]

Actually, this congress and style of government is perfectly fine for modern America. The problem is that they have strayed away from a constitutional application of the government for the better part of 100 years now. It started around the civil war, ramped up in the 30's got worse in the 50's with the cold war and here we are today with you claiming that government is borked because every single bill has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.

The constitution never intended the federal government to be spending money at the district levels in the ways we are today. That was supposed to be a function of the state and local governments. The idea that a person by nature of not participating in interstate commerce will effect interstate commerce so it under the power of the feds is absolutely ridiculous but it is one of the main excuses for the giveaways. People sit on the couch and bitch about it because their "public education" has neglected to tell them they can do something about it. Hell, even here, about every 4 years you get people who are convinced by their schools that their vote doesn't count then bitch and complain when the other guy wins like he stole the election or something.

If the feds were acting constitutional, the government would be perfectly fine.

Re:And the problem is...

[mpe]

Oh, yeah, we have this Congress which is elected district by district, so EVERY SINGLE BILL has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.
Don't blame Congress for this, the Constitution we have was designed for an 18th century agrarian society. No matter how carefully it was designed the resulting system cannot possibly be ideal for a modern 21st century post industrial society

The US is hardly unique in having a legislative assembly populated by people elected by voters from specific geographical subgroups of the country's population. It's more likely that something within the US (political) culture or political system is responsible here, something which isn't present in many other contries.

Benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The project is also expected to create more than 120,000 jobs â" a win for the Korean economy.'"

You know I'm going to ask the hard questions that no one asks when stories like this appear.

First how many of these new jobs will be those who actually build and create this new infrastructure?

Second how many of these new jobs never would have existing with the present high speed connection?

Third in this E-penis war of faster is better, has anyone from either government or academia (one's who don't have a stake in the outcome) actually measured the benefits high speed broadband (as opposed to just Internet access) have brought to their society as a whole, individuals, and business?

Fourth how many of high speed benefits are still theoretical or very limited in actual application?

Right now as I see it there is demand for high speed broadband but that doesn't automatically translate into "it's good for society". Especially a society already suffering symptoms of information overload, and "little physical activity" obesity. Not to mention for all the vaunted benefits of access to the worlds knowledge. Literacy levels really haven't improved to match the investment.

Good for them, but...Modem wars.

[Anonymous Coward]

"While contracts have changed over the years, Mine with timewarner states it as being always on and always available.

For which I will be over charged a vast amount for my 10Mbps connection that will never really run at full 10Mbps.

So out of the box, they already broke their contract, (Yes I'm aware that the wording is more complex and they no longer read anything like the old ones that some of us still have)"

So even though you realize the language has changed you still go with the old argument based on outdated language.

Nice to see that the "new and improved" high-speed connections have changed the way people debate. Hate to see what would it would be like if we were still using dial-up. Maybe with a Korea connection we could put prettier frames around our old chestnuts.

Residential power supply

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't have said so. Who in their right mind would run a mission critical server on the power supply one has at home? Somehow I don't think the wife would appreciate a huge diesel generator and fuel tank in the garage.

Re:Residential power supply

[delirium of disorder]

Who in their right mind would run a mission critical server on the power supply one has at home?

I run my home network off of batteries charged with solar panels. A simple (large) UPS would probably give me 99.9% uptime. It's not hard to provide stable power in most of the USA. The hard part about home hosting is getting a stable connection. Most cable/DSL/Wireless ISPs might have only a few hours of downtime a year, but this can still be unacceptable for some hosting situations. It would be nice if there was a cheap, easy way to get lines from a couple of ISPS and run an autonomous system from home. Only when every Internet user has an ASN (or equivalent) and redundant connections, will the net really be democratic and uncensorable.

Re:Residential power supply

[MBGMorden]

Not every server is "mission critical" (and a lot that ARE deemed so aren't as important as many of their operators choose to believe).

Our guild uses a Ventrilo server for example. If I had the bandwidth I'd gladly host it myself at home. That's server plan and simple. If it goes down or dies, we'd use the in game WoW voice chat system or just type that night.

Re:Residential power supply

[Anonymous Coward]

The original post stated that running servers from home connections destroys pretty much all pricing structures for both 'intertube' providers and dedicated hosting providers.

By stating not every server is mission critical you've proven my point. It wouldn't destroy the business models of these facilities, rather it would weed out the WoW fanatic 1U boxes and suchlike. No serious business would run boxes from home when downtime = potential lost orders.

Correction, sorry.

[korean.ian]

sorry, 1000Mbps

But what is it worth?

[kahrn]

Am I the only one that fails to be excited by such speeds? For servers, great -- but for home use? I'm more than happy with my 8Mbps connection and cannot imagine what use a 1Gbps connection would be, beyond torrenting and such.

It'll never happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

First the Korean Fiber-optic Commission (KFC) must overhaul the country's infrastructure. If you ask me, the won't do it cause they're chicken.

Actual user speeds?

[TheSync]

In all this talk of "Gbps Internet", I am interested in what end-user Internet speeds are actually achieved in Korea. As of right now, there have ony been a few million 10 GBe ports shipped, so I am wondering how anything near 1 Gbps line speed can be maintained by any significant number of users at the highest hierarchy of the networks.

It would be interesting to look at TCP speeds on large downloads from a number of servers around the world, with the numbers from Korea and the US compared.

It is possible that "within network" speeds in Korea are very fast, but Internet speeds may or may not be.

I have sub-Mbps Internet speeds at home, but I don't find it a problem for VOIP or videoconferencing or downloading most things short of a whole CD ISO.

Re:Actual user speeds?

[crossmr]

In Korea I can get 60000-70000kbps down on speedtest depending.. outside korea it starts to drop off. Korea is a very self-contained internet, but its still the internet.

Re:Actual user speeds?

[freedom_india]

Korea is a HUGE LAN powered by TCP/IP.
Their connectivity to non-korean networks (essentially the world) is limited.
Please stop saying: ,quote>Korea is a very self-contained internet, but its still the internet

because you don't know what you are talking.

Re:Actual user speeds?

[crossmr]

Why? You can browse korean websites from outside Korea. North America experiences the same latency going to Asia or going to Europe. Europe experiences the same latency going to asia and going to the US.

The speed to Japan from Korean is still fairly decent (15000-20000 down) and I've pulled over 6000 down from some servers in the US.

When I mean it is self-contained I mean that Koreans have very little need to go outside their network because all the services they generally use are in country, while Canadians, Americans and Europeans (because of the English use) cross the borders more often. Living in Canada, Living in Korea and being a network engineer I think I have some clue what I'm talking about. Almost all modern LANs used by people (inside your work, your home, etc) use TCP. There is one person here who doesn't know what they're talking about. I'll give you a minute to think about who that is.

Re:Actual user speeds?

[freedom_india]

I didn't mean to insult you, and am sorry if i did that.
Korea is a very closed country, network-wise.
Unlike Germany or France or even fascist-UK, Korea's connection to internet is limited and practically non-existent.
Hence, calling their LAN a global internet (on the scales of Germany or USA or fascist-UK) is a misnomer. They don't have & they don;t want that bandwidth.
Internet is after all a network of networks meeting at various points and locations speaking one language. Various points do not exist for Korea, and locations outside their Capital do not exist for direct connectivity to outside world.

Re:Actual user speeds?

[crossmr]

Korea isn't remotely closed network wise. They have just as much connectivity to the rest of the world as the rest of the world has to other parts. Korea has one of the highest(if not the highest) broadband penetration of any country out there including outside the capital. They have to go undersea cable everywhere because the only land mass attached to them is North Korea. That limits their bandwidth to outside countries, but its more than sufficient seeing as I can still pull 20000kbps down from Japan. The korean internet speaks the same language as all the other networks, TCP. The koreans have their own language, but so do the germans, so do the japanese, so do any of the other 170 some odd countries out there. I honestly have no idea at this point what your point is because you're making little sense.

Are you listening Gordon Brown?

[AmiMoJo]

Brown is doing the right thing - spending lots of money to stimulate the economy and lessen the effect of the recession - and surely this is a golden opportunity to bring the UK up to speed on broadband.

Gigabit fibre means lots of fibre production, lots of cable laying, lots of infrastructure building, lots of technology deployment. It's an ideal government project too - too risky and expensive for private companies, but certain to be a vital bit of infrastructure like the road, water, electricity or phone networks in the very near future.

243 million won per job?

[katorga]

34 trillion won divided by 120,000 new jobs....ouch.

How do we berate executives but not Congress

[Shivetya]

or is this a case of "they are all crooks but my guy isn't"? It is the same logic that prevents action on schools because "our" school is fine, it is the other guy's school who is failing.

Many of the bonuses are contractually owed. If a person meets their contract they should be paid.

We berate companies for losing billions yet the US government, CONGRESS, gets a free pass for deficit spending and losing billions if not trillions.

The culpability starts at the Federal Government. They set a horrid example then expect people to act otherwise.

The stimulus bill is a perfect example of just how dysfunctional that organization is yet they get to tell others that it the others who have a problem.

The real entitlement class is the politician.

Re:How do we berate executives but not Congress

[Shakrai]

I dunno. Congress has approval ratings around 20% (lower than GWB's you'll note) so I don't think you can say we don't berate them. Problem is that we keep voting the same bastards back into office.

or is this a case of "they are all crooks but my guy isn't"?

Well naturally. My Congressman is delivering much needed economic development to our district. Yours on the other hand is wasting our tax dollars on pork.

Re:How do we berate executives but not Congress

[Garrett Fox]

Because we've accepted that politicians have a right to take as much of our property as they feel necessary, never mind the Constitution. In contrast, we've convinced ourselves that corporate executives have no right to the wealth they create because they're greedy, exploitative, making too much money, &c. Never mind that "corporations" includes mom & pop businesses as well as the world's Wal-Marts. "Fair is foul and foul is fair."

Re:How do we berate executives but not Congress

[Savantissimo]

"Many of the bonuses are contractually owed. If a person meets their contract they should be paid."

But companies, particularly phone companies, are essentially little communist kleptocracies managed by apparatchiks led by politburos who write themselves whatever contracts they like. Whatever regulations they like, for that matter. They also decide what the board resolutions will be and vote all the stock that wasn't voted by real shareholders (or more likely fellow-kleptocrat fund-managers).

CEO's and other executives are no better than congressmen, but they do get paid a lot more - even if you just count the tax dollars.

Country of Korea

[nog_lorp]

Good one, Country of Korea. Kinda like the Country of America!

Do you know what this means for gaming?

[CrazyJim1]

1,000,000,000 bits/second. Assuming you aggressively go to 50ms updates, that means you get 20 default updates a second for your position. 50,000,000 bits / 50 ms It takes about 50 bits to encode your position/velocity vector. 1,000,000 bits /50 ms * 50 moves/bit So I didn't do a good job with my units, but that was the calculations for a single player. So you can have a million other players in the game where everyone is just moving around. You'd have a bit less when you factor in their actual play moves in. If you do an aggressive melee only algorithm where you don't update the people near you as often, you'll see you can get upwards of 10 billion people playing an action game with no lag. If you go serverless, you can half your latency. Not many companies do this because you need to write months worth of antihacking. I'm just putting this out there because 50ms latency is fast enough to allow fighting games even. For the number of people who will actually play a game on this planet, you don't need much more than 1GBS to get everyone who wants to play all on at the same time. This means even new concepts for games are possible... But they'll be slow to be made because the game design abilities of corporations aren't what they were in the early days. Probably the first thing we'll see is 1000 player capture the flag in a game like quake. But this is Korea who likes their long dry grinding MMORPGS so I'm not sure what route they'd go... probably they'll just spend less when hosting a server. You could totally make an action MMORPG with that nice of broadband, but no one wants to risk their entire MMO on a skill based combat system because it conflicts with the concreteness of a stat based system.

Re:Do you know what this means for gaming?

[Ninjaesque One]

Grinding MMORPGs is not the half of it. I recall that the most popular game in Korea is Kart Rider, playerbase 6 million(of a country of 24 million). Obviously a racing game. There are some extremely popular FPSes, including CS2 and a Korean game named SuddenAttack. I'm just telling you that MMOFPS's are quite viable over there. For a combination of grinding and FPS, see Gun.

Re:Do you know what this means for gaming?

[brkello]

People have and do risk it. Just none have been very compelling or good.

a waste of time

[bheading]

What on earth is the point in creating this stupendous bandwidth in the access network when the core networks of countries across the internet are incapable of handling it ? This is like the ill-fated megahertz race in desktop PCs.

Re:a waste of time

[crossmr]

Because Koreans generally don't care about the "core networks of countries" across the internet. Their sites are all in country. While microsoft, and a few other big name brands might offer their website in Korean, they're not getting used that much. Koreans use Korean mail providers, korean websites, and korean services all provided in Korea.

And by all

[shellster_dude]

They are of course including North Korea, which may have 2Mbps of broadband, but no electricity to use it with!

Spam

[queenb**ch]

Other than pork being a dietary staple in Korea, it seems that they'll now be serving up high speed spam..... wheeeee. I can't wait.

2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:Spam

[budgenator]

Korean's love Spam brand luncheon meat, they'll pay more for Spam than for beef steak; it's consider a delicacy there.

Re:Spam

[korean.ian]

While it's true that Koreans do enjoy Hormel Spam a great deal more than the average westerner, they will not pay more for it than beef steak.

Re:Spam

[wmac]

US is the number one source of spam, not Korea. or you mean everyone except US is prohibited from earning (stealing) from spam?

Obviously,

[retroStick]

The bigger the tubes are, the more Zerg you can fit down them.

Re:Obviously,

[Lord_Breetai]

The bigger the tubes are, the more Zerg you can fit down them.

You could say they're getting upgraded Nydus Canals.

what a waste

[buddyglass]

It gets mentioned so often it's almost cliche, but I have to invoke the broken window fallacy.

South Korea is going to blow a crap load of taxpayer money to subsidize a project that will have marginal real benefit. Not to mention the capital invested by the telecoms. Sure, it will create 120,000 jobs. You could also pay 120,000 people to dig holes and fill them back up again. That would not be a "win" for the Korean economy.

What is the opportunity cost, in terms of job creation, of removing that spending money from consumer's hands? How many jobs would the telecoms have created if they'd invested their portion of this project's cost into other areas instead?

Re:what a waste

[freedom_india]

South Korea is a much more active democracy where former presidents/prime ministers have been indicted, convicted and sentenced to jail for corruption and other illegal activities.
USA pardons presidents, congressmen and other officials for breaking the law.
So i don't think the korean tax payer would see his money go waste.
120,000 jobs are filled in by locals, not by H1-Bs as is the case with Citi and other banks which got the $350 Billion bailouts.

How many jobs would the telecoms have created if they'd invested their portion of this project's cost into other areas instead?

How many jobs would comcast and verizon have created if they had actually invested federal subsidies into their infrastructure instead of throttling connections.
In Korea and Japan we have companies making a real effort to INCREASE their performance and output as a way to increase profits.
In US we have companies which throttle our connections and raise fees to increase profits without investing in infrastructure.

Re:what a waste

[buddyglass]

I think you missed my point. I wasn't trying to suggest that this money would be wasted because it would be spent on something other than the project it's earmarked for. My point was that even if it is spent on the broad band project, and they accomplish their goals, it may still have been a waste. The Korean government's contribution amounts to about $20 USD from every man, woman and child in South Korea. That doesn't seem like much, until you remember that the private telecoms are also spending about 25 times that much. Where do you think they'll get that money? Answer: their customers. In other words, current Korean broadband customers will pay more in the next five years in order to finance this new infrastructure. That's money they're not spending on clothes, entertainment, etc. In other words, every other part of the Korean economy.

Then there's all those jobs. Each one represents someone who isn't working somewhere else. Meaning companies not involved in this project will need to pay more for their labor than they might have otherwise.

All this might be worth it, if the end result of the project was something really useful. But considering they already have 100Mb/s, is the extra speed really that useful? How about when compared with what else you could do with $25 billion USD?

If the new infrastructure is really going to be that useful and beneficial, couldn't the telecoms foot the bill themselves, since they're the ones who're going to eventually profit from it?

Also: It looks doubtful that South Korea is less corrupt than the United States. Don't believe me? US: 7.3, South Korea: 5.6.

Spineless shareholders is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The owners of the companies (the shareholders) only in very rare cases take action. They should be demanding that the overpaid incompitents get fired.

I would like to think of Gordon Gecko from the movie "Wall Street": A rich OWNER of companies (albeit temporarly) instead of a rich EMPLOYEE. Buyers of companies and shareholder 'activists' are reviled by many and the noble, well paid CEOs are the good guys. A company is property. Owners can abuse their own property. Employers should not be able to, but CEOs can and do.

In short, vote Ron Paul.

ALL of Korea???

[IceFoot]

The OP and TFA talk about "All Koreans... in Korea the entire country... the Korean economy."
I guess I missed the news that South Korea and North Korea had laid aside their differences and united. Damn, why didn't Slashdot carry that news?

Yes, Koreans are gamerz

[billstewart]

Lots of articles over the past few years have talked about Koreans being heavy-duty gamers, so I'm not surprised by latency being a concern there. For much of the population, of course, the latency and bandwidth are easy to provide, as long as an apartment building doesn't oversubscribe its feed, because the bits have to go all the way down town to reach the servers. There are a lot of people living in rural areas or other cities, but a lot of it is Seoul.

The real question is what interesting things the Koreans are doing besides gaming with their more typical 10-100mbps - apparently there's a certain amount of online shopping (looking at the video from the local grocery store to see what's on special), but there aren't that many applications that need high bandwidth these days other than watching television, because there's so much spare CPU around to do things like compressing video.

yeah, yeah all *South* Korea?

[billstewart]

The Republic of Korea would be happy to run data to their cousins in the north, but Fearless Leader really doesn't want his people even watching capitalist television, much less having real communications.

What's the bandwidth of RFC1149 carrier

[billstewart]

What's the bandwidth of an unladen swallow carrying clay tablets?

Perhaps you are right...or not

[tacokill]

What you say may be true but your qualification using the word "server" concerns me.
What if it's all clients?

You see, there is no black and white line between a "server" and a "client" on the internet. At the packet level, perhaps there is but at the IP level, all nodes are equal. That isn't by accident. That is by design. The ISPs/telco's - years ago - made the crappy decision to provide asynchronous service. Now, the chickens come home to roost when customers want better upstream performance. No duh. I could have saved them the hassle and told them that 15 years ago when aDSL and the other half-baked technologies were being rolld out. In fact, many of us here at /. did just that.

Your example is exactly what this is all about. You make his point for him - in the US, a synchronous 1.544 Mbps link costs ~$350/month. IOW, too f'ing expensive! Meanwhile, the Koreans have 1 Gbps links...

Re:Perhaps you are right...or not

[vlm]

in the US, a synchronous 1.544 Mbps link costs ~$350/month. IOW, too f'ing expensive!

Good luck getting an unframed T1 worth of payload. You'll get 1.536 minus any encapsulation load over a T1. Depends if they're providing over frame relay, or PPP, or SLIP or HDLC or who knows.

T1 is not shared on the local loop. Doesn't matter if its old 4 wire B8ZS or newer HDSL 2 wire, you've got a dedicated pipe between your modems. Not so for most consumer grade shared services.

$350 is dirt cheap for T-1 level of service. If it drops, a hi-cap NOC tech will notice and call you, and a hi-cap tech will be onsite within 4 hours depending on your local telco carrier. Doesn't matter if its xmas eve or 4th of july evening or if its snowing. If your consumer grade connection, maybe someone will arrive sometime during business hours if you call them to set up an appointment days in advance, maybe.

It is possible to pay for a T1 and not get T1 quality of service. That is an individual circuit problem between you and your provider, not a problem with the technology.

Re:Perhaps you are right...or not

[tacokill]

you missed the forest among the trees, my friend...

At least in South Korea...

[Chris Snook]

North Korea won't even have tin cans and string everywhere by 2012.

This means...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that their domination of Starcraft tournaments will now be at a lower latency!

Holy Christ!

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked (just now), an OC12 at 622Mbps costs around 50K A MONTH!! Now I presume this service won't have all the same support behind an OC12, but still...

Great!

[ZosX]

Now I can exceed my Comcast transfer limit in just over 2000 seconds!

Now will someone please tell me where the billions of tax dollars we spent on communications infrastructure went to? Best I can get is 6/1.5mbps for $40. Not all that terrible if you compare you 768k/128k dsl which is still pretty common around here unfortunately, but really, not all that great. I mean clearly the cost of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure is not so high since the Asians seem to be doing it to great extent with much smaller markets and wealth to tap into. I doubt they are getting billions from their respective federal governments as well. Since when did corporate welfare become such a passable option? The white collars scoff at people collecting from the government and yet their employers are lining up at Washington with their hands out nearly every day now it seems. I hope they bankrupt us all and then, finally, perhaps we will see how foolish it is to support bad investments with tax dollars. Whatever happened to free markets? If you want to blame anyone, blame yourselves for becoming a country of nearly pure consumerism, for sitting on the couch watching TV, for creating the service industry to cater to your every lazy need, for slowly giving up the soul of what makes a culture alive and positive. Since major corporations seemingly hold a great deal of power in washington it would behoove anyone who wants to short circuit the power circle to dethrone the corporations that are spending millions and billions of dollars in washington in lobbying. You can't really blame your local idiot for taking their money. I mean, it is obviously, very tempting. Why not go after the real villians? Look up Monsanto for instance. You might find some interesting things. And hey, you should read up on some of Exxon's overseas adventures! But who am I to tell you what to think? Its funny because all this terrible stuff that is happening is reported on and in print in various ways and even reported by the government, etc, and just so very few people actually look. Why bother hiding anything when nobody is even looking or cares? Sure there's all kinds of secret, maybe conspiracy stuff, but hey, why get all crazy. People like rational concepts.

I know a lot of free thinkers lurk here and they are a very rare breed these days. I know a lot of you don't own/watch TV, have tuned out, been through a few trips, etc. Can you see a dying culture? Can you see the transformation? Its going to be pretty slow at first but as people start shocking back into what is really real and stop dreaming I think it could get a little crazy. Or maybe nothing will happen at all. Either way we're kind of fucked. Sorry for the random note at the end here, but I feel like rambling a great deal and why not? Bob Dylans on and as much as I can't stand the way he sings Blood on the Tracks is getting me all inspired to do some stuff.

Re:Great!

[freedom_india]

tell me where the billions of tax dollars we spent on communications infrastructure went to

Cayman islands and bahamas as condos, NYC posh apartments, WAGs, engagement rings worth millions, Timeshares in Hawaii... etc
This lobbying happens because our democracy is in 18th century while we live in 21st century.
I mean, think: why did we have representatives elected? To be OUR voice in Congress because not all of us could afford to go and vote on each bill. Travel in 18th century was not as easy as today (with exception of TSA-screwed-up air travel).
Now, we can all participate directly in such decisions via TV, Internet, Mobile, Telephones, fax, etc.
So why do we still elect congresscritters do take decisions that favor large corporates.
Bring democracy directly to people via direct voting like California and Swiss, and see corporates flounder.

Re:Great!

[ZosX]

While the people should have a greater say I am still all for a republic versus a direct democracy. Think about it, if we had direct democracy in the states, abortion would be illegal, homosexuality would be a crime, etc.

from wikipedia:

"Ochlocracy (Greek: or okhlokratía; Latin: ochlocratia) is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. In English, the word mobocracy is sometimes used as a synonym. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it's akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the easily moveable crowd," from which the term "mob" originally derives.[1]

As a term in civics it implies that there is no formal authority whatsoever, not even a commonly-accepted view of anarchism, and so disputes are raised, contended and closed by brute force might makes right, but only in a very local and temporary way, as another mob or another mood might just as easily sway a decision. It is often associated with demagoguery and the rule of passion over reason."

Our forefathers thought long and hard about direct democracy and realized that mob rule was one such pitfall. As to lobbying, it has been around since at least the beginning of the 19th century, but more likely since the dawn of the United States, however it has truly reached epic proportions these days.

http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/5107922

2 billion in 2005 alone!

Why countries like Korea are ahead:

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, congress.

The acronym would have been better...

[Metsys]

...if they called it the Korea Kommunications Kommission.

Usage is a fake "problem"

[Anonymous Coward]

The only ISP:s that have problems with customers actually using what they're paying for are the greedy fucks that don't use some of all that money they're gouging to actually upgrade their backbone to handle it.

I work for one of the two largest swedish ISP:s and people using bittorrent to download, movies, music and porn 24/7 just isn't a real problem for us. We have plenty of backbone capacity to spare since we UPGRADE it every now and then to keep ahead of how much is actually being used. ANd we still make shitloads of money! Even in this piss-poor economy we're doing just fine and dandy, (still hiring rather than firing people).

And all this in a country with labour-laws that would make most american unions drool and taxes that would make most american conservatives reach for their guns...

Britain's asperation is 2 Mb/s by 2012

[cabalamat3]

Meanwhile, Britain hopes to achieve 2 Mb/s across the country by 2012, only 500 times slower than South Korea. Go Britain!

Open up Korean internet for real now?

[canithappenhere]

If Korea used this opportunity to take some steps toward a truly open Internet where installing a buggy ActiveX control isn't a requirement for everything from banking to shopping to government services, then they'd really be getting somewhere. http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-korea.html

My Korean computer drinks the internet

[incognito84]

I've been in Korea for the last two years. Even when I'm downloading content from the Western United States, Australia or some parts of Canada, I still rarely drop below 5Mbps, depending on the server. I can get up to 10Mbps on Bittorrent. On Korean sites its a whole nother story. My computer drinks the internet. It's pretty great.

a bit more detail

[mateomiguel]

Here's another article with a bit more detail, from a Korean news source: http://www.koreaittimes.com/story/korea-plans-gigabit-internet

meanwhile in australia

[dudpixel]

All this internet speed talk makes me cry...

Here in Australia even 24Mbps is marketed as super fast, and in reality most of us only manage to reach 5-10Mbps on a good day. A large percentage of Australians still cannot get anything faster than 1.5Mbps thanks to poor infrastructure choices from Telstra (1.5Mbps is ADSL1 here - yes it can support 8Mbps but Telstra in its wisdom limited it to 1.5 right from the start).

There seems to be no progress in increasing these speeds or upgrading infrastructure anytime soon - so it looks like we'll be even further behind the rest of the world with every passing year.

and dont get me started on pricing...

You can do gigabit if you don't do PON

[thogard]

Japan and Korea started out with PON which used expensive optical tricks but saved having to have active repeaters and switches in odd places far from the exchanges. Now that optical swtiches are getting very cheap, its cheaper to put a switch in a box somewhere and run a direct fiber pair from each home to that box. That has the advantage that you can do gigabit today and fast later.

I can't even imagine the price

[gelfling]

If this was the US the price would be $1000 a month.

Re:I can't even imagine the price

[freedom_india]

You forgot to add other tricks up the sleeves of comcast:
1) $1000/- excluding FUS, State & federal taxes per month. Including them, the first month's bill will come to $2104/- because:
a) Installation charges=$350
b) Modem charges=$200
c) Visit fee (because they screwed up first place)=$150
d) Connection fee=$250
Rest in FUS and taxes
2) You are limited to HTTP, HTTPS and FTP procotols only. All other protocols cost $210 each per month. BitTorrent costs $350 per month on each torrent to "reimburse" RIAA/MPAA.
3) Total traffic usage is limited to 100GB per month. Beyond that, the connection will be cut off. Of course, no roll overs.
4) High-usage connections will be monitored every 15 mins and constant maxing out bandwidth will result in connection throttling to 2Mbps or less unless the user reduces usage, at which point it would be restored to original speed pending further investigation (in other words, next billing cycle).
5) Non-usage will result in additional connection charges of $15 a month
6) No static IP. Static IP will cost $131 extra per month
7) Not to be used for commercial purposes.
That's all i can think of now...
God, i hate our ISPs. Especially Comcast.

Re:I can't even imagine the price

[Nonillion]

Not only that, they would force you to accept some bundled package of shit you don't want (phone, tv and Internet) just to get that price. Complete with all the shitty restrictions (no servers, the blocking of ports 25, 80 etc) and to force you into auto bill pay plan.

Currently in S. Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt's home is 100mbps connection, speed tests on download gets me about 50mbps, upload around 35mbps.

Grandparents is also a 100mbps connection, around 70mbps on the down, and 50 on the up. I've gotten up to around 1.9-2MB/s on direct link downloads at this location.

To servers in the US, I've reached speeds barely over 1MB/s.

All new apartments are pre-wired for it. You just call the ISP and your connection is up almost instantly.

For costs, it's around 20,000-30,000won... so that's what, $15-$20 USD.

And for the person who stated Korea historically, gets crushed by it's neighbors needs to go back to his history books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Korea

Little Korean Reality Break.

[Anonymous Coward]

  I lived in Korea, and let me tell you something about their broadband..it is UGLY! Poles covered with thick cable, with cable wires coming directly from the pole INTO the second story building through the window! It is like ugly spiderwebs all over the place. Yes, some places are wired apartments, housing complexes, but for the most part, it is nothing more than thick cables from poles going into the housing via the shortest distance.

  Also, please do not forget like 70% of whole Korean populations lives in one city. It is a big city, but compared to USA, they are all stuck in a can.

shows how far behind we are....time for obama to g

[Teriblows]

if obama is going to mean anything he has to really stomp on the current situation where the RIAA has gotten into bed with our isps to limit bandwidth use. these people have insane conflicts on interest, isps are also doubling as media companies now so they only want you to use their media services. and they will stifle internet growth to do it if need be.

1.3 Trillion Won equates to about 1 billion US.

[Chas]

Subject line says it all.

Also considering the relative size and land-mass coverage, drawing an equation to the US is...complete shenanigans at best.

Can't eat bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't these the same folks we send massive amounts of food aid to? Everyone needs a little more fiber in their diet but not this kind.

No

[Giant Electronic Bra]

The problem is that every Congress Person who doesn't bring home the bacon to their district isn't going to get reelected, thus every bill basically has to guarantee something for every district. This is a function of the fact that each representative is only accountable to their own little part of the country.

Nothing in the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from spending money on things that primarily benefit local areas. Congress has limited authority to make laws. It doesn't have limited authority to spend money. These are two different things and should not be confused. The only limits on Congress' ability to spend money are that it can only make an appropriation for the "Army" for a two year period, and 'from time to time' a 'complete accounting' of what money was appropriated and spent must be prepared.

If we want to FIX the mess we have with how our money is spent, then we are going to have to make some serious and sweeping changes in the structure of the legislative branch of our government.

One might ask why other countries, like the UK, which has a Parliament elected from districts don't have similar problems. In part they answer is that they do, but being a MUCH less geographically extended state the problem is a lot less apparent because the districts are much smaller and so close together that money going to any one district also benefits a bunch of other nearby ones. This makes it far easier for an MP to simply act in the general interest.

Re:No

[sumdumass]

The problem is that every Congress Person who doesn't bring home the bacon to their district isn't going to get reelected, thus every bill basically has to guarantee something for every district. This is a function of the fact that each representative is only accountable to their own little part of the country.

That's not necessarily true. I don't credits the productivity of the are I live in with the success of government taking from me or other areas. If all of congress would just cut it out citing real reasons like the constitutionality of it, that perception would change for those people who think like you mentioned.

Nothing in the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from spending money on things that primarily benefit local areas. Congress has limited authority to make laws. It doesn't have limited authority to spend money. These are two different things and should not be confused. The only limits on Congress' ability to spend money are that it can only make an appropriation for the "Army" for a two year period, and 'from time to time' a 'complete accounting' of what money was appropriated and spent must be prepared.

Well, no. Congress has all sorts of limits in spending money. You see, the constitution tells them what rights they have in legislation. Outside of those rights, the government isn't supposed to be involved at all. This is a severe limit on the government and would prohibit most of the social programs it is involved with right now. It would also limit most of it's spending too. The problem is that the government has left the constitutional building so long ago, you think it's actually proper for it to give money away with not constitutional limits.

If we want to FIX the mess we have with how our money is spent, then we are going to have to make some serious and sweeping changes in the structure of the legislative branch of our government.

Yes, I agree with you. But the extent of the changes could seriously be back to a constitutional government instead of this charade we have now.

One might ask why other countries, like the UK, which has a Parliament elected from districts don't have similar problems. In part they answer is that they do, but being a MUCH less geographically extended state the problem is a lot less apparent because the districts are much smaller and so close together that money going to any one district also benefits a bunch of other nearby ones. This makes it far easier for an MP to simply act in the general interest.

I will take up arms if necessary to stop a UK style Parliment from replacing the congress. Outside of military bases and federally operated ports, traditionally we never had the problem of elected officials bringing the bacon home. It wasn't until the new deal where it turned from a let the people make their own future to a the federal government is necessary to our survival. Sure, you had people who stood to gain from statehood and so on, but for the most part, the thriving success in the country happened when the federal government stayed out of the way.

I can go on about this and how we have over regulated ourselves in the local areas because of the abuses of the federal government. But I don't think it's necessary. The role of the federal government is only to involve itself in matters of state and commerce between the states and foreign governments. It's not to be directly invested in areas within the states. The Idea behind the representatives is to stop damage to the people, not give them something. It's an oxymoron to think that the feds need to take away from the people just to give back to the people. That's a role of the state and local governments. The entire idea of public interest has been perverted and you can see this when they have 80 year old crippled grandma on the news in a perfectly sound house that was condemned t

Re:No

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Obviously we don't agree. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Nobody can prove what a differently structured legislature WOULD actually do, but I stand in good company.

As far as your interpretation of the Constitution goes, the problem with it is it is just plain considered to be wrong by pretty much everyone who has ever had a say in interpreting it. Nothing in Article I says that Congress may not appropriate money for any purpose. If it does, then I'm blind and can't see it and neither apparently has any federal judge in the history of the United States seen it.

Re:No

[sumdumass]

Listen, the constitution defined what the government can do, not what it can't do except with specific roles concerned with rights the people hold. By not limiting the government or even speaking about giving money away, the constitution has made it perfectly clear that it is not within the limits of the government.

For over 100 years, that was the norm for the interpretation of the constitution. The prohibition amendment was a constitutional amendment because nothing gave congress the power to forbid the sale of alcohol, they needed an amendment to give that power. Then the newdeal comes around and despite most of it being found unconstitutional with Roosevelt telling the courts "i control the executive so you can't force me to stop" the courts then claimed an exantion of the interstate commerce clause to give latitude to the government that was never there before then. Only after this, did the constitution become a whatever I can get out of it type document. This is when the "Living document" ideology came into play where people think that they can just reinterpret anything to fit the modern times despite the fact that there is a process to amend the document is something outlives it's usefulness.

There are many people who have interpreted the constitution in this way. Nothing being in article one means that nothing give the congress the power to do so. They can't act without power granted by the constitution. That's the difference between out government and England's parliament. You should actually read some of the supporting documents for the constitution and learn the damn history surrounding it and the formation of this country before latching onto the problems that make the government in the shape you claim needs replaced. You should also look at the rational behind many of the interpretation that you seem to think agree with you, they actually point to specific places in the constitution that allows the behavior or law which contradicts what you just said.

Fuck dude, just learn some history.

Re:No

[Giant Electronic Bra]

See, I have read it. I've read all of this stuff, many times no less. I don't know where you get this idea that there was ever some mythical interpretation of the Constitution that was ever universally held that is what you are advocating. It has NEVER been interpreted that way. Well, certainly there have been people who have claimed to interpret it that way, like say Thomas Jefferson, who as soon as he was elected President immediately went out and made the Louisiana Purchase.

You are entirely correct when you say that Congress does not have unlimited power to make laws on any subject. I don't even disagree with you that the authority of Congress has been stretched well beyond what was originally intended, but an appropriation of money is not a law. The two things are different. Article I provides for Congress the power to raise and spend money. If you read the Federalist Papers you will find that Hamilton was CERTAINLY clear in his opinion of what Congress could do.

Not everyone who doesn't happen to agree with you on all points is ignorant or foolish. In fact, as I've said before, I stand in very good company. There is simply a divergence of opinions on how to interpret and use the Constitution. It would be nice if there weren't and it was all spelled out with infinite clarity, but it isn't. It wasn't even DESIGNED to be entirely clear.

Re:No

[sumdumass]

See, I have read it. I've read all of this stuff, many times no less. I don't know where you get this idea that there was ever some mythical interpretation of the Constitution that was ever universally held that is what you are advocating. It has NEVER been interpreted that way. Well, certainly there have been people who have claimed to interpret it that way, like say Thomas Jefferson, who as soon as he was elected President immediately went out and made the Louisiana Purchase.

I call bullshit. Or at least a misdirection.

""They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please... Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on National Bank, 1791. ME 3:148"

While Jefferson did expand the power for making treaties in the Louisiana purchase, at least he had an actual goal in mind within the purpose of the constitution, to maintain peaceful relations with France which is well within the established bounds of the state as well as within the limits of the constitution and to protect our borders and commerce lanes. You might not agree that the purchase itself was constitutional but the entire intent behind it was. That being said, Jefferson acted on grounds that the authority was granted to by the constitution even if the act didn't meet the strict interpretation. This still falls within the bounds of my interpretations and the interpretation of the founding fathers.

Besides, it doesn't matter how someone acts when it is contrary to their stated positions, the positions still remain and still reflected the intent. What I mean by that is, even if he was wrong, which he felt he wasn't, he never left his interpretation that the constitution prescribes what the government can do and and restricts them in areas of rights the people hold. Just because his act was or could have been unconstitutional, he still thought it was and that it was justified by the constitution.

"For authority to apply the surplus [of taxes] to objects of improvement, an amendment of the Constitution would have been necessary." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:354

"Our tenet ever was... that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money." --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1817. ME 15:133

"If, wherever the Constitution assumes a single power out of many which belong to the same subject, we should consider it as assuming the whole, it would vest the General Government with a mass of powers never contemplated. On the contrary, the assumption of particular powers seems an exclusion of all not assumed." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1814. ME 14:83

Now that I got some of my more memorable Jefferson quotes out of the way, we should not that he wasn't present in writing the constitution as he was stationed in France at th

Re:No

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Heh, yeah, quoting lots of text is a pain, ;) Don't worry, I follow you.

In my opinion it is educational to look at what people have said in the past, but it is also instructive to look at what they did. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc SAID a lot of things. They also DID a lot of things, and frankly their actions speak louder than their words. Jefferson DID take an expansive interpretation. He DID purchase Louisiana. There are numerous other examples as well.

Beyond that it is IMHO a quite limited view of the thinking of that time period to believe that one or a few people's views adequately encompass all the diversity of opinion of that time as to what was intended by the Constitution. It wasn't written or put in force by a few men. The Constitutional Convention was a whole body of people and if you continue to read, even within those sets of documents you or I have mentioned you will find a whole range of things considered and things said.

Those things which are NEEDFUL to be done must be done. Pure and simple. Congress may, and does, appropriate money for those needful purposes. There ARE real and practicable limits to the authority of Congress which are substantial and tangible today. I don't agree that Congress is outside of its authority to requisition funds for those needful purposes. Its POWERS, the specific means which it can take to its ends are limited, but not its ability to work to those ends. Even Jefferson obviously saw that.

The way money is appropriated and spent today is a direct consequence of the way the Congress is structured. Unless that is changed there will not be a substantive change in the way it functions. You're perfectly welcome to have a different opinion on that, but if you actually look at what Congress HAS done, historically, throughout the history of the United States you will see quite quickly that it functions now essentially as it has functioned since the beginning. These problems were always there. When you exclude from consideration the practical solutions you are just limiting yourself to thinking 'inside the box' and you won't solve the problems that require thinking outside that box.

There is nothing 'sacred' about the structure of our government. It is a tool. Instituted amongst men to serve their needs, and we have every right and indeed every responsibility to make and remake it as we see fit and as we in our however limited wisdom believe it needs to be made. If it is broken, fix it. It IS broken.

Re:No

[sumdumass]

In my opinion it is educational to look at what people have said in the past, but it is also instructive to look at what they did. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc SAID a lot of things. They also DID a lot of things, and frankly their actions speak louder than their words. Jefferson DID take an expansive interpretation. He DID purchase Louisiana. There are numerous other examples as well.

Well, sort of. You see, second hand quarterbacking can always see the flaws in the logic but it can't see the motivations that led to the flaws unless you consider what they said. For the most part, even when they strayed away from what they were saying, they believed they were being true to it. Also, it's a little unfair to just ramble quotes off because some of them were meant to address specific situations and don't necessarily translate to different one. However, I believe for the most part that we can derive intent from them.

Beyond that it is IMHO a quite limited view of the thinking of that time period to believe that one or a few people's views adequately encompass all the diversity of opinion of that time as to what was intended by the Constitution. It wasn't written or put in force by a few men. The Constitutional Convention was a whole body of people and if you continue to read, even within those sets of documents you or I have mentioned you will find a whole range of things considered and things said.

I'm confident that the conversations over the constitution went between fears of a to powerful government and thoughts that the government was limited. That certainly was the debate surrounding the bill of rights in which the argument against them was that the constitution didn't give the government the powers to encroach on the rights protected by it so they weren't necessary and the thinking that adding the bill of rights would somehow lead to people believing that those were the only rights they had.

That's a big part of the theory that the constitution give the government permission to do limited things. You had founders who thought it would be misinterpreted into making those the only rights the people held when in fact the people were supposed to hold all the rights and the government was only supposed to have a limited role. Also, the arguments for the bill of rights largely support the same sentiment. It states that even though there is a limited government, we want assurances. Of the 12 original amendments to the constitution, only 10 were ratified alongside the ratification of the constitution. The two that weren't were not specific restrictions on the government as a whole (like the original 10 are) but changes to article on. One of those eventually was ratified and became the 27th amendment.

There may have been other views, some were completely against the constitution and wanted the weakness of the confederacy while others wanted to be repatriated with England. The views that I think are most important are the ones then ended up shaping the constitution and rallied enough support for it's passage.

Those things which are NEEDFUL to be done must be done. Pure and simple. Congress may, and does, appropriate money for those needful purposes. There ARE real and practicable limits to the authority of Congress which are substantial and tangible today. I don't agree that Congress is outside of its authority to requisition funds for those needful purposes. Its POWERS, the specific means which it can take to its ends are limited, but not its ability to work to those ends. Even Jefferson obviously saw that.

The way money is appropriated and spent today is a direct consequence of the way the Congress is structured. Unless that is changed there will not be a substantive change in the way it functions. You're perfectly welcome to have a different opinion on that, but if you actually look at what Congress HAS done, historically, throughout the history of the United St

Re:No

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Good old Columbus... I grew up around Dayton, I sure know what Ohio politics is like, lol. Nice enough place though.

See, I think we aren't drastically far off in what we ACTUALLY envisage. I think this is essentially what happened with the framers of the Constitution. They had certain logical reasons for wanting to follow certain principles, but they also had the problem that eventually they had to have an actual government and that government would have to function in the real world, REGARDLESS of those principles. I'm not saying in VIOLATION of them, but it had to be able to say in some sense "OK, we actually need to purchase this chunk of North America and technically we cannot do it, so we're going to have to wiggle a bit here."

In EXTREME cases even the sorts of arguments that GWB made for spying on people ARE cogent arguments (I'm not saying HE had justification to rely on those arguments). If the choice is really between the collapse of the government and taking an action beyond its authority, then in a sense the duty of the officers of government IS to maintain it and follow the rules as best as is possible. Then it is the responsibility of the citizens to make a judgment about those actions.

As a British friend of mine once said "We don't understand this fascination you Americans have with this piece of paper. Paper doesn't make men free, only men can make themselves free."

I actually share your reluctance at the prospect of drastically editing the Constitution. Maybe for somewhat different reasons than you have. Frankly I don't think the current citizens of the US are all that much in a mind set to insist on their rights being upheld anymore. They've forgotten the lessons of history (which most of them know nothing about anyway).

The whole debate about spending authority comes down to the basic issue of "what practically MUST be done". For example, there is no clear explicit authority for the Federal Government to regulate pollution. However it IS necessary for our modern society to have such regulation. When we didn't have that regulation the Cayahoga River BURNED, remember that? I saw it, it was pretty nasty.

You could ask "can't the states do that"? But the answer is apparently "no, not really". Every time Vermont (where I live now) tries to deal with some environmental problem businesses up and threaten to just move over to some other state where they can buy off people and do what they want. Nowadays they just threaten to move to China. So we really HAD to have, realistically, some national regulations. It was a necessity and it would be immoral to ignore a necessity.

Modest proposal

[Savantissimo]

What if we ...
got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,

required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,

enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,

required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,

required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,

gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,

federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,

rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,

made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,

made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),

abolished sovereign immunity,

issued and enforced writs of mandamus on the basis of officials' obligation to uphold all laws at any citizen's request,

construed the Declaration of Independence, the preamble of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights together as the supreme substantive law; any law, interpretation, or application of government power which did not actually effect their stated goals would be stricken down, even if otherwise constitutional,

abolished corporate privileges and personhood,

made corporate charters subject to challenge and enforcement,

gave minors and persons under guardianship a standard way of proving their ability was equal to others afforded greater rights, and correcting that injustice,

made objective tests or demonstrations of learning substitute in all cases for legal requirements of schooling and degrees for issuing professional licenses,

reinstituted independent grand juries, private prosecution,

reinforced the right of juries to decide the law,

and required jurors to be knowledgeable and capable of critical thought?

Re:Modest proposal

[Giant Electronic Bra]

What if we ...
got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,

The first part of that would seem to be a step in the right direction. It would still be pretty easy to block legislation in the Senate though. Maybe the Senate realistically should just get a 'yeah' or 'nay' on appropriations, no modification allowed. I don't know how you would do that second thing, who would decide the criteria for who 'understands the policies'? That person/group/body/whatever would now be in a position to decide who gets to vote. Nobody gets that power in my Republic...

required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,

Again, there is no body that could be vested with the authority to make this decision. It is nice to WANT something like this, but it has to be actually practicable as well.

enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,

And again, there is no way to actually enforce such a provision, thus it would be mere empty words.

required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,

Uh, AGAIN, who decides these things? This is simply not possible. Legislation does not consist (usually) of a single law. It generally makes "patches" to any number of existing statutes in order to effect some end. It would be practically impossible to attain consistency. Who exactly would interpret the law and how would these people check the consistency of one law against another? Besides I don't see this as a problem.

required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,

That is like dictating that 'All automobiles must weigh less than 200 pounds'. It is simply an impossibility for any modern society. And who gets to decide what is 'knowable' and how small 'small' is?

gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,

And now you will never get anything done because every single court from now to eternity will be permanently doing nothing but processing an endless repetitive stream of filings against every single law there is with no end.

federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,

Or alternatively so they can spend their time endlessly suing everyone else at no cost to themselves. We already do have a right to representation in our defense. We also have the ability (and have used it) to set up private organizations which can take on worthy cases, like the ACLU.

rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,

Congress decides what courts exist and what their jurisdiction is. If more courts are required then we just need to have Congress set them up and fund them.

made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,

I don't know what this means. How is that different from what we have now? Sure, people cannot often afford every appeal they would like to make or ideally should have available to them, but there has to be a practical way to accomplish this in order for it to be mandated.

made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),

And why is it you would pick on a particular segment of the population? Who gets to decide who is or isn't 'a lawyer', and doesn't it strike you as a bit unjust to say to someone "Oh, you took the bar exam, you no longer have your rights as a citizen". So

Fascist UK?

[ambrosen]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

haha

[Anonymous Coward]

i am korean

There are various contributions

[Giant Electronic Bra]

No doubt. The inherently winner take all setup of the Electoral College doesn't help either.

If you look at other countries certain patterns seem to emerge. Presidential systems modeled after the US system tend to be more authoritarian centralized states for example.

Any political system which attempts to balance power between different groups HAS to by its very nature lead to political compromise, otherwise it would just be a 'tyranny of the majority' (at best). So we have to look for a way to allocate representation in which the representatives are least attached to one specific constituency if we don't want the process to be simply a game of 'give me some pork and I'll give you some'. Whatever that way of organizing the legislature is, that's the solution to the problem.