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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.'"
I bet the botnet operators are furiously masturbating right now. With that kind of bandwidth, they could destroy anything they wanted.
Now their Zergrush will reach me even faster than before!
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...
I'm pretty sure the northern part would be happy to just get some food.
A map tells the tale better than words.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All of Britain's going to have 2Mbps broadband.
...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.
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?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
for the second comming of starcraft!!!
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
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.
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.
Insightful + Sad = Funny?
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
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.
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.
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.