Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I bet the botnet operators are furiously masturbating right now. With that kind of bandwidth, they could destroy anything they wanted.
...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.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
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.
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.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
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.