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.

Oh sweet..

[Anonymous Coward]

Now their Zergrush will reach me even faster than before!

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

[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

[Spazztastic]

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

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

[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

[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.

Meanwhile

[SRowley]

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

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the 20th Century mate :)

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.

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?

They are getting ready

[nobodylocalhost]

for the second comming of starcraft!!!

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

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

[jgtg32a]

Insightful + Sad = Funny?

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: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.