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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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?

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.

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: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.