All Korea To Have 1Gbps Broadband By 2012? 386
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.'"
Meanwhile (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Informative)
It would be, but that wasn't his point. This was:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html [pbs.org]
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Informative)
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.
That depends how tightly constrained they were in how to execute it.
Verizon is GPON (Score:3, Informative)
Verizon is deploying GPON or Gigabit Passive Optical Network. The Ethernet port on the Optical Network Terminator outside my house is labels 1000Mbit. My area was lit 4 months ago. That means it was something like 5 years for Verizon to get to my area of Los Angeles... not for lack of effort.
It takes a long time to pull that much fiber.
Re:The 60mbps falacy (Score:5, Informative)
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
Synchronous (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.
Re:Good for them, but... Let us not forget... (Score:2, Informative)
South Koreans consume LOTS of bandwidth just watching "broadcasting" and films/"pirated" DVDs. Probably there is little crackdown on at least the piracy of DVDs and related material because ultimately sales downstream probably depend upon or are enhanced by it. Plus, in the South, there are seriously dedicated gamers who'd probably put to shame just about any of the rest of the world.
The Bandwidth Capital of the World
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.html [wired.com]
Korea Broadband Archives (12)
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/broadband/korea/ [websiteoptimization.com]
Who Wants To Watch Full Length Movies On Their Mobile Phones?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080401/105208716.shtml [techdirt.com]
south korea, bandwidth
http://www.zdnetasia.com/tags/south-korea+bandwidth/ [zdnetasia.com]
Until and unless US bandwidth consumers need or demand higher speed and quality and demand it for reasonable (to consumer, not to the execs/investors or excessive R&D or boondoggling) pricing, people here will just shrug it off.
Afterall, don't forget:
Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don't want it
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/two-thirds-of-americans-without-broadband-dont-want-it.ars [arstechnica.com]
Most Americans without broadband don't want it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/poll_most_without_broadband_dont_want_it/ [theregister.co.uk]
(Captcha: maleness)
Re:Synchronous (Score:2, Informative)
I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.
I think he did mean synchronous, as in SDSL.
Re:Food for thought (Score:1, Informative)
If shareholders held CEOs accountable for irresponsible and unethical behavior, we wouldn't be in the financial crunch we are now...
Don't you mean VOTERS instead of shareholders, and DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS instead of CEOs"
To wit, with a nice video of DEMOCRAT Barney "There's nothing wrong with Fannie Mae" Frank: [hotair.com]
Video: Democrats insist "nothing wrong" at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in 2004
By 2004, all of the elements of the current financial collapse had been in place for several years. The aggressive approach to enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) started under Bill Clinton in 1998, and the seemingly endless appetite for paper by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had turned massive amounts of bad loans into mortgage-backed securities to spread their cancer throughout the system. In 2004, a year after the Bush administration tried to tighten regulation and oversight on Fannie and Freddie, Congress was told yet again that disaster loomed. The Democratic response is instructive to seeing who really sat back and allowed this collapse to occur (via Power Line)
Re:Synchronous (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Synchronous (Score:1, Informative)
*cough*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line [wikipedia.org]
Re:Food for thought (Score:3, Informative)
>So you're saying, for example, Kentucky (101.7 People/sq mi)is about the same as France (297/sq mi)?
You cant cherry pick stats for your own disengenious argument.
Denmark is 22 people per sq mile and is one of the top broadband providers in Europe. 40 for Finland.
What all these countries have in common is good government. You can have all these broadband toys if you wish, but not with the current US system and the cronyism that comes with it.
Look at New York state.. The second largest city (Buffalo) is five hundred or so miles away from the largest city.
That's fine, thats just a fiber run. We cant even get intra-city communications to anywhere near 100mbps like we see in Asia or Europe.
Im left to ask why?
Its the cronyism. The population density excuse is a myth. Hell, why doesnt Connecticut have 100mbps? They have an ultra-dense 700 people per sq mile. There are NINE states more dense than France, yet here we are with shitty ADSL with DSLAMs several miles apart with no plays to deploy more or all the RST packets we can eat from Comcast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density [wikipedia.org]
Re:Good for them, but... (Score:2, Informative)
I've never experienced or heard of capping or throttling of connections in Korea, and as far as I can tell, there is no port blocking or detrimental traffic shaping going on.
Koreans do not use that much bittorrent, though edonkey was popular until a couple of years ago. I have heard some people being fined for distributing copyrighted material over p2p, but the fines are relatively moderate (a couple of thousand USD at most), and they don't cut you off.
Koreans get a most of their streaming content for free from commercial operators. Buying digital media online is also pretty cheap. I believe the current rate for non-DRM'd mp3 files is like 5 dollars for 40 songs.
This is of course killing DVD rental stores, as well as bootleggers (though they do sell Chinese bootlegged DVDs where there's more foreigners).
Currently I can saturate my 100mbps connection only when downloading stuff from the main portal sites or the larger universities (KAIST Gentoo mirrors are crazy fast), or downloading stuff from Korean peers on p2p networks.
They are pushing more and more stuff over the networks (HD and VOIP), though, so 100mbps can become a little too slow for a regular household in a couple of years.
Re:Good for them, but... (Score:3, Informative)
The problem you have here is peering arrangements mixed with greed.
Peering: In Australia there are only 3 cables leading out to Australia, all very expensive to build maintain. This causes the cost of sending large volumes of data overseas to rise, seeing as we share a common language (except for the US, which did not seem content speaking English like the rest of us) so a great deal of our content comes from overseas. In Korea, they have no common language with other nations, whilst cultural influences will come from China and Japan a significant portion of the traffic on Korean networks was generated in Korea. Traffic generated from local networks is dirt cheap compared to what it costs to get data via undersea cables. In the US, lack of popper regulation amongst telco monopolies has created an environment where they are actively hostile to each other, in Australia ISP's are forced to peer with one another allowing them to share infrastructure, this de-monopolises the market and fosters competition as I can pick any telco operating in my area regardless of who laid the line (more often then not it was Australian taxpayers before the system was privatised).
Corporate greed: US Telco executives need to make insane amounts of profit to justify their existence to shareholders, this amount needs to increase each quarter and said telco exec's are unable to see past that quarter. Asian companies don't have this problem and are perfectly capable of thinking ahead and investing for 10, 20 or even 50 years which is why Asia's economies didn't go down the toilet like us westerners. An Asian telco will spend 2 million dollars now if it brings in 10 million dollars over the next 10 years, a western telco will refuse to spend the 2 million, take 1 million in bonus's and tell the shareholders that they made 1 million in profit.
I detest the fact that ISP's have to be given taxpayer incentives and backroom deals in order for their infrastructure to be upgraded.