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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.'"
"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.
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.
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?
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.