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.'"
Botnets (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet the botnet operators are furiously masturbating right now. With that kind of bandwidth, they could destroy anything they wanted.
Oh sweet.. (Score:4, Funny)
Now their Zergrush will reach me even faster than before!
Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Again!
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how many Koreans actually use their 100Mbps of bandwidth as it is.
Do they have trouble with "bandwidth hogs" like Comcast claims to?
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
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? Or maybe that entitlement is more worthwhile because you agree with it... hard to tell really. Personally I find both repellent but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Food for thought (Score:4, Insightful)
...but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.
And what, precisely, do all these overpaid corporate suits do? Besides grind their companies into the ground, then leave with huge golden parachutes when they finally get canned. There's simply no link here between performance and reward. If you have a certain kind of job, you're entitled to big bucks, even if you're totally incompetent.
I agree that an excessive sense of entitlement is a problem all across the board. You may find the ESOE typified by $50 TV upgrade certificates more irksome than $50 million dollar executive bonuses. But the issue here isn't what pisses you off more. The issue is what does more damage.
Those $50 dollar certificates aren't that big a line item, and arguably will even serve to stimulate the economy. All those overpaid executives who sweep in the rewards regardless of what they do is not only a huge line item (one-third of Merril Lynch's final year red ink was bonuses) it is destructive of the very marketplace that creates all our wealth. It's a kind of corporate socialism. I assume you're against socialism?
Re:Food for thought (Score:4, Insightful)
The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them.
Dude, the shareholders are as pissed off as anybody. The interlocking nature of corporate governance makes it impossible for them to have a real say in this.
Anyway, we're all a little tired of this libertarian ideological lockstep. This idea that private agreements are private business only seems to apply when it's to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. I'm willing to go along with it most of the time — entrepreneurs needs a lot of freedom to do their thing — but it can't be the last word in all arguments. Right now we're reaching the point where all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, and the economy is expected to function solely for their benefit. That's actually a kind of socialism. Not any kind Karl Marx would recognize, but it resembles all the old socialist states where the economies existed solely to benefit a small ruling elite while the economy at large stagnated. The only difference here is that the elite is a collection of private individuals, not some political cadre that waves a red flag [wikipedia.org]. Though, ironically enough, the American right now also waves a red flag [redstate.com].
Besides which, do recall that many of the companies that pay themselves these huge bonuses are begging for government help!
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.
And a bonus structure where the fox guards the henhouse. Great idea, guys.
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:How do we berate executives but not Congress (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Food for thought (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Putting money into an industry providing infrastructure people actually want and need while creating many many jobs across the country seems like a pretty good idea to me. Maybe that was your point.
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:4, Insightful)
Break that damned bill into separate bills, directly target at the US economy. I'd back the part with rolling out broadband....it would help our infrastructure, as well as help create new jobs.
I can't, however, go along with some broadband funding bundled with some kind of 60's beatnik museam in SF and other crap we don't really NEED at this time.
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
The state of Vermont disagrees with your assessment about dealing with rural poverty.
15 years ago the governor helped get massive funding to bring DSL to rural Vermont enabling thousands to improve their education and develop marketable skills. It didn't solve the problem completely but I am a product of that legislation which ultimately got me DSL in 1997 where my knowledge took off with so much at my fingertips. Telecommuting is also very common in the state.
I would say Internet access should rank high
And the problem is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yeah, we have this Congress which is elected district by district, so EVERY SINGLE BILL has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.
Don't blame Congress for this, the Constitution we have was designed for an 18th century agrarian society. No matter how carefully it was designed the resulting system cannot possibly be ideal for a modern 21st century post industrial society.
But cheer up, once the country has been misgoverned by this abomination into total collapse then the fascists will come
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They already did give 200 billion : http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
We (the US) don't even have one city with that kind of connectivity available for the public to use. Sure a few companies in each city have fiber access, but how many homes? We are getting chewed alive. Slovenia has faster internet than we do.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats a fair assessment, but the US east of the Mississippi is a lot like any European country. Lots of cities withing short distance of each other. The argument that the US is too spread out applies only to the western states. I think there's a real problem here with broadband. At the very least the east coast would have 100mbps service to be on par with Korea or some European nations.
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Synchronous (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with your overall point, but I think you mean symmetric rather than synchronous here.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
Not spread, SCALE (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really so much of a "spread out" problem. It's a problem of SCALE. Any time you scale a project up orders of magnitude, you get problems. It's the same problem with large corporations and bureaucracies. You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a fair assessment, but the US east of the Mississippi is a lot like any European country.
So you're saying, for example, Kentucky (101.7 People/sq mi)is about the same as France (297/sq mi)?
"Lots of cities withing short distance of each other."
Look at New York state.. The second largest city (Buffalo) is five hundred or so miles away from the largest city. Now it might be fair to say the US eastern seaboard up to two hundred miles inland is the same as Western Europe but 'east of the Mississippi?
"The
Re: (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 f
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Didn't the US.gov already do that in the '90s and we saw nothing out of it?
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With respect to your comment, I can only point out that you completely missed the point. Of course it wouldn't work out quite like that (which is why I said "based on size only"). My point was that after investing money into such a project, even assuming 90% losses through inefficiency and corruption (which is ridiculous to begin with), one shou
Re: (Score:2)
No more than you did in responding to it. That is, like you, I was aware of the US broadband scandal, but I didn't realize you were intending to make an oblique reference to it. OTOH, the actual results of the US effort were in large part what I was referring to when saying the results in the US would depend on how tightly constrained the telecoms were in the use of the money.
Substantively, though, I think we're on the s
Re:Food for thought (Score:4, Insightful)
So even if we actually have seen some sort of progress and it's not exactly 0%, it's damn close. If you're actually arguing that far less than 1% of subscribers receiving 40% of the promised bandwidth is acceptable progress, perhaps it is not me that is making intellectually dishonest arguments?
Oh and RE your sig, "Randall nailed you privacy nerds [xkcd.com]", I dare say you might be missing the point. The security of a system is only as good as its weakest link, which almost invariably is the human element. In this case the encryption is sufficient to make the computer portion of information security too difficult of a target, making the soft human target much more efficient and practical. Of course, all this is assuming you can even base an argument on a web comic whose purpose is much more likely to make us nerds laugh and not "nail" an argument one way or the other.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not based on area. No, it's not based on population. It's based on local population density. The average density of the whole country isn't relevant, it's the distances between clusters and individual houses that matters, and you cannot accurately boil that down to a single representative number.
Re:Well, I think you know the answer to that. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds bonus worthy to me.
For what? Being in charge when the government decided we needed better bandwidth? For having not already taken steps to put this type of bandwidth in on the company's own dime?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the last sentence of my post you quoted is a reference to the so-called $200 billion broadband scandal [pbs.org]. If you browse through my comment history you'll see that I've been calling the whole "area too large" argument bogus since the beginning, but I too would be thrilled to hear we could get 100Mbps connections in major cities. I would then even understand if they couldn't quite justify rolling out tens of th
Not "all Korea" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure the northern part would be happy to just get some food.
A map [flickr.com] tells the tale better than words.
Re: (Score:2)
In DPRK, they will let thousends of singing young people display image of broadbend internet server on stadium, using color tables. They can turn it into a car in 2 seconds as well.
So true....Not "all Korea" (Score:3, Interesting)
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, diff
Re:So true....Not "all Korea" (Score:5, Funny)
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" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
> So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic
> projects that have marginal long-term benefit.
-shrug- If I were going to start a company that could benefit from a super-modern tech
infrastructure and a tech-savvy and well-connected work force, this move would float
South Korea that much closer to the top of the list for where I would set up shop.
Would the economic boost be enough to offset the cost? I guess we'll see.
Re: (Score:2)
These are my thoughts exactly. I was wondering if North Korea had become so insignificant to the world that people just forget about it and call South Korea "all Korea"...
"
So long as they have nukes and a paranoid Gov. I don't think anybody important & intelligent is likely to forget the North Koreans, although I'm sure they'd like to...
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So is their price going up? (Score:2)
on an unrelated note... (Score:3, Interesting)
Malware and spambot writers everywhere are making plans to move their botnet hub to korea.
Meanwhile (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Meanwhile (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviuos solution: outsource goverment to Korea.
Good for them, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In the USA its more of a problem of greed, over-selling and business model.
While contracts have changed over the years, Mine with timewarner states it as being always on and always available.
For which I will be over charged a vast amount for my 10Mbps connection that will never really run at full 10Mbps.
So out of the box, they already broke their contract, (Yes I'm aware that the wording is more complex and they no longer read anything like the old ones that some of us still have)
Their business model is bas
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And the *real* useful bandwidth will be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only 10% (Score:2)
I'd take that
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: (Score:2)
Lucky you. I'm in the San Fernando Valley, and still no word on when FIOS will show up here.
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Building backbone networking and central data centers is a lot cheaper than laying "last mile" cable. I mean a lot cheaper. It would be very strange if they dug up every street in South Korea to string cable, and then neglected the relatively small expense you're concerned about.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well forever it's been said the last mile is the problem because of the endless miles of ditch digging it'd take. Is there really a big problem laying a big bundle of cables point-to-point between centrals? Besides if they delivered 20% of what they claim before and 20% of what they claim now the increase is still the same...
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt that it will much of an issue. Having anywhere between 10-100Mbps (up&down) up to what ever and making it really work at that level like a charm will open up a lot of potential to people spreading up around the country and creating jobs as they slowly spread..
I'd work from home, and even better I'd like to move over to a bit more rural area only if I could get a 10Mbit line up there.
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Enough. Only one download has to come from the outside world; after that a swarm of incredibly high speed Korean peers distribute the torrent locally with enormous efficiency.
What, you thought people were going to use a gigabit connection for web browsi
What's the oversubscription? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody know what these countries that offer 100/1000Mb to the home can actually deliver? I'm kinda doubting that Korea is going to have a 10Gb circuit for every 10 customers. If you had an apartment building with 100 units in it, do we really expect the ISP to be able to provide 100Gb simultaneously?
I just want to know, is this a case of providing high speed "last mile" but it's business as usual when it comes to oversubscription in the distribution/core layers.
Re: (Score:2)
Does it really matter if all 10 users can get full 10 gigabit eithernet at the same time? Can you really think of any application where a home user would need 10 gigabit for more than 10 minutes at a time... per day? At that point your hard drive's write speed(s) become the bottleneck. Maybe down the road (10 years) you'll have users who can tap out a 10 gb connection 24/7 but right now with 5 megabit I can download video over bit torrent faster than I can watch it (at standard definition, 720p divx downloa
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And then there's the problem of content? How many content distribution networks could actually stream that kind of bandwidth at a time?
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HDMI 1.3 is 4.9 gbps, which, I think, is uncompressed, but 1080p in its standard color bit doesn't use half of that. Multipl
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Well, at least it means that BitTorrent's local-user-finder feature (I forget the real name of it) will let you download off your neighbor at ~1Gbps, right? :)
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It's just in trial here so far, but the "test family" for my ISPs 1Gbit connection has so far managed to measure 920Mbit on it.
Unfortunately, the details are rather slim. All they say about the specifics is that they had a very hard time digging up a way of managing to utilize the bandwidth. My personal guess is they finally found a popular enough torrent to seed. Since they specified the test was done on upstream speed.
Of course, it's a far cry between a single family having it and them opening it up for t
Motivation (Score:2)
There could be only one thing to motivate all of SK to pull this off: StarCraft 2 must be a bandwidth hog!
The 60mbps falacy (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (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
Perhaps you are right...or not (Score:3, Interesting)
What if it's all clients?
You see, there is no black and white line between a "server" and a "client" on the internet. At the packet level, perhaps there is but at the IP level, all nodes are equal. That isn't by accident. That is by design. The ISPs/telco's - years ago - made the crappy decision to provide asynchronous service. Now, the chickens come home to roost when customers want better upstream performance.
Home buyers' demands (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
All Korea? (Score:2)
Wow, that's quite an achievement for the communist North that can't even feed its own population.
Sure, not entirely surprising for the South, but an amazing achievement for all Korea.
Unless, of course, "all Korea" is a little more selective?
WMF (Score:2)
WMF: Weapons of Mass Flooding.
economist article on broadband (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13024563 [economist.com]
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.
It's not how much more spread out the US is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [worldpoliticsreview.com]
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.
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I'm not using that as a reason why the US broadband is so crappy.. hell, time warner just capped mine at 250kb/sec basically because they put too many homes on one line, and service is horrible. Of course service still sucks, now it just means anything I do download takes 3 times as long as normal when I let it run over night.
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It's not WHERE your population does its urbanizing, it's how much it is urbanized. The actual figure is 75% of the Canadian population lives within 200 mi. of the US border: but if we were EVENLY spread through that area, we would be totally non-urbanized and hugely expensive to network. (It would be less than 15 houses per square mile.)
The population of Canada is 79.4% urbanized (living in centres of >=10,000 population).
http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/canadian_cities.html [citymayors.com]
The population of the USA i
Create jobs? (Score:2)
It doesn't "create 120,000 jobs". All it does is shift jobs from one place to another. If there is any creation of jobs, it will be in the follow on services.
Still, I'm all in favor of adopting more asian-like policies in America. Korea has a long list of goods that it tarriffs or protects against foreign imports of, and I think it is long overdue for America to do the same. Let them sell their Hyundais to each other, that's what I say.
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And let us sell Pontiacs to each other. Oh, wait, is that a new "Chinese Curse"?
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And let us sell Pontiacs to each other. Oh, wait, is that a new "Chinese Curse"?
It depends on the Pontiac. My 2004 GTO was a great car. Yeah, I know it is a rebadged Holden Commodore but the V8 and tranny are made in Michigan. Besides, I have an alliance exception. Aussies fought with the USA in pretty much every war we've been in since WWI, and fairly with the US. There's absolutely no need for Australia to a have sent anyone to Iraq but there's enough dead Australians from the adventure that I think
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How about Canada? Have we had enough deaths in Afghanistan to qualify?
Is "sending soldiers to die for US-initiated wars" the new criteria for trading partners?
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No, it shifts money from one use to another. Not all uses of money are equal in effect on jobs, so its quite possible it does create jobs. (Of course, lots of job creation analysis doesn't really look at the job losses, if any, from wherever the money is taken from, so doesn't really address net job creation; if that's the case with whatever underpins this claim, it may well be defective for that reason, but the whole oft-
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but move jobs around is completely bogus
It's not bogus at all. My point is that the statement "creates 120,000 jobs" is completely dishonest.
Unless that money is sitting in a room in the form of gold bars, then, a movement of investment from one place to another will have a net change in jobs. You might have more jobs for less money in one situation, versus, less jobs for more money in another, but, the overall size of the stimulus to the economy will remain the same from that act, although the shape of
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The argument that moving money from one use to another cannot create jobs is bogus. Determining whether the statement "creates 120,000 jobs" is accurate relies on information not presented in this discussion, it may or may not be.
Again, this is completely bo
And with that 1Gbps (Score:3, Funny)
The old people will only use it for email.
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...and their email attachments will be high def porn!
Do you know what this means for gaming? (Score:3, Interesting)
They are getting ready (Score:5, Funny)
for the second comming of starcraft!!!
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I mean Cuba.
Ah yes, you mean a country with a repressive autocratic regime, where a single paragraph of mild criticism of the government can land a journalist in jail for 20 years. But of course you trust that government's self-reporting regarding its subjects' health.