The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea already claims the world’s fastest Internet connections — the fastest globally by far — but that is hardly good enough for the government here.
By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.
A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is under way, with 1,500 households in five South Korean cities wired. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.
Wow! One gigabit/sec would be unbelievable.
Found by Cinàedh.
“Wow! One gigabit/sec would be unbelievable.”
No, what’s unbelievable is that the country that invented the tech can’t have that.
Uncle Dave,
That’s because having an Internet connection isn’t an entitlement. If you want it, you should pay for it rather than wanting your fellow citizens to subsidize it for you.
Great. Faster spam from zombied Korean boxes.
And that’s all because there’s now Cuntcast nor AT&T in South Korea.
Although easier to deploy there, I agree the Korean government and people know they need to invest in infrastructure for eLearning, medical and commercial transaction….and future innovation.
They are building the highway system that we once built that enabled interstate commerce, trucking, employment and near infinite capabilities enabled by the highway system here.
In contrast , the conservatives want to invest in defense and continue their military government jobs program. It is 750Billion per year today and produces nothing except for dead and crippled young men and women.
Seems Korea has a better plan
It’s easy to afford stuff like this when your national defense is subsidized by another state.
Also involved in my current dispute is they started charging me an extra $10 per month for “enhanced internet speed” I think from 12 Mbs to 18 Mbs or whatever the tech/flim flam middleman said. I responded I have never witnessed more than 1.2 Mbs while downloading. He said that was a limitation of the sending source. I said why did I need an unrequested upgrade if my current service was already 10x over spec’d for what the real world provided?
He said lowering the speed might still affect the download speeds I was getting. I said I didn’t know anything but I didn’t believe him. So far, he said he would remove the fee. Still arguing about the other two chiseling acts on their part.
Treat your customers like scum and tell them how great a service you have? I don’t think so.
You must read the fine print however, it’s 1 Gig per second for the first megabyte, then it’s throttled to 1 MB per second thereafter…oh wait…I was thinking of Comcast if they offered it.
#9–rbitting==ha, ha. Well done.
10x father than what they have now? So they already have 100mb/s internet speeds already?
I’m lucky to get 10% of that speed on Comcast.
Don’t you worry the President wants to give everybody high speed broad band (It may not meet the spec for such but that’s just semantics.) Of course after they get through with it it will most likely cost a couple of grand a year and we will be stuck with it for the next 50 years or so.
@Guyver, you said: “That’s because having an Internet connection isn’t an entitlement. If you want it, you should pay for it rather than wanting your fellow citizens to subsidize it for you.”
Do you understand exactly which organization performed the technical work to create the internet, and which organization underwrote that work? Just so we understand each other.
“Hi Definition TV that is 16 times CLEARER than current one”.
Huh? What does that mean?
Wow…. We pay $45 a month for 400 kbs service via microwave. The only wires we have comming to our house is AC power. Living out in the sticks does have its downside sometimes.
I’ve read that broadband in the US is pitiful, and though skeptical at first I’ve come to believe it. I get what I consider to be a “reasonable” 3 Mb/s down from AT+T, but they just jacked the monthly rate by $3 a month for no reason, plus they tend to reset me when I start hitting the pipe hard. It seems we don’t really have competition here in the US. I encourage you all to switch to anyone but AT+T DSL, as it is run by Satanists and Al-Qaeda.
5, Dallas,
How do you think the Internet or our Interstate system came to be? Eisenhower got the idea for the Interstate due to Hitler’s Autobahn which was a road system with military use (by design) in mind. ARAPNET was developed to help the U.S. Army packet switch their comms.
8, Bobbo,
They’re just getting you to subsidize their “upgrades” for an infrastructure that’s essentially a sunk cost: http://tinyurl.com/34sgwlq
I’m not sure what you’re paying for Internet connection, but I’m paying $29.99 per month for 12Mbps w/o bundling with another cable product…. for the next 2 years. Good enough for me.
Have you considered calling to cancel your Internet service? The retention departments usually offer you cheap plans to keep you as a customer. 🙂
13, Publius,
DARPA
The U.S. Army had an interest in fighting wars w/o a centralized command & control. The Army requested that DARPA research into a way to have comm rerouted should a node (unit) be taken out because the Army didn’t want to cripple an entire operation due to having the head of its snake chopped off.
I used a gig connection briefly at a demo unit at a university in Singapore and it was amazing. But I remember thinking, what good is it if you reach your “unlimited” cap within the first couple of minutes?
Here, in Thailand, we have poor service but I still manage to maintain a 3 Mbs down with some dependability. I do not engage in piracy so I have no idea where all these US, UK and Oz TV and movies are coming from but I’ve got a couple hundred gigabytes of them I will never get around to seeing. I’ve got an old netbook sitting there just grinding away all day and all night and the ISP never says a word about my usage. About US$35/month.
Funny how US sites won’t let me download from their entertainment options – I suppose so I won’t violate their copyrights and redistribute their programming thereby forcing me to let somebody else violate their copyrights for me. They are saving me so much money!
18, Animby,
Another way to look at it is why on Earth do ISPs single someone out for abuse for fully utilizing the bandwidth they’re paying for?
Those same ISPs offer the “abusers” the option to upgrade to a faster speed (which is nothing more than changing the settings of the “abuser’s” modem).
Fully utilizing a slower speed plan is abuse but not if you pay for a faster plan. The infrastructure still remains the same.
Here in Michigan, one of the local companies have 3Mb/sec speed (better than most of the others) with “guaranteed rate lock plan” – that your monthly bill won’t EVER go up.
BUT…
They just incorporated their cap on the service – only 5 Gb per month!! $2.00 per Gb after. WTF! I hit 5 Gb some days! (A netflix movie – some P2P, download a couple big patches)
#15 Added bonus is you can make tons of popcorn!
Just had to throw that in as it was microwave.
As of right now the government is either lax or non-existent in controlling the providers of broadband.
Hence this is a free market for that sector of business.
So it is painfully obvious that the free market is failing us as the providers simply do not want to pay for that last mile to bring us the speed.
We ask for it and they ignore us, because it is too boo hoo expensive to do that and our profits would go down in the short term. The shareholders would have our heads if they had to WAIT for profit.
Free market, code word for business can screw you and you have no recourse.
Cursor_
“And think about this, I know there are people on Second Life right now, but imagine a Universe where you have the Star-Trek holodeck where you could literally ask the computer, err, to act or ask questions to get answers. In the same way, if you look at some of these software companies they’ve made it sooo complicated to interact with their technologies. Ah and, err, at the same time the underlying architecture and the platform, it’s almost a chicken and egg question because alot of it was built and architected around bandwidth constraints therefore you had to deploy technologies that were much more complicated in terms of interacting and communicating. Now, as broadband deployment, and more importantly, err, if you look at the megabits-per-second, err, how much, err, how much information can we get through the pipeline is going to be so important and, as new and new software and techologies are being introduced, what you going to see is huuuge-change from how applications are architected from skip-logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than, err, binary or COBOL ways of interacting.”
The “By the Minute” DINOSAURS that run Amerecan Telecoms WOULD NEVER ALLOW ANYTHING LIKE THIS !!! What would they do with their BILLING MACHINES ??? Gotta have “REVENUE” along with MONOPOLY RENTS !!! America will ALWAYS LAG BEHIND IN “SERVICES” REGARDLESS OF WHERE THE TECHNOLOGY IS INVENTED !!!
#23 – Jimmy D – you write funny but you have some points.
Let’s just hope the Google 1 gig demonstrations are a great success. Then maybe Google will start to roll out in other markets and drive the competition.
Dear People,
This news only matters if you live in Korea AND decide to surf only websites that are located within Korea.
Reason? The backbone connecting Korea to the rest of the web is quite weak to the point that these high speed upgrades are negligible.
This might matter to those who are Koreans and who surf Korean websites, but not to those saying “Im gonna move to Korea for teh high speed interwebz!”
Good for them.
# 25 tdkyo said, “The backbone connecting Korea to the rest of the web is quite weak to the point that these high speed upgrades are negligible.”
New transpacific cables are coming on line. Korean servers already cache everything they can. I think a gig down speed is gonna be pretty damned fast.
By 1990, Japan – NTT, government, others perhaps – had made the decision to pull all of the copper telephone wiring out and replace it with fiber optic cables. The US government and telecommunication providers just don’t work that way. It’s still local monopolies.
The US apparently will get a big push in wireless speeds and coverage. Capital outlay simply means less profits for many companies.
# 17 Guyver – I thought DARPA was working on removing centralized command and control for the ICBMs when packet switching was developed.
Nature abhors a content vacuum.
#2
“That’s because having an Internet connection isn’t an entitlement. If you want it, you should pay for it rather than wanting your fellow citizens to subsidize it for you.”
Oh, easy enough. Where do I go to get a link like this at my residence?
#17 “They’re just getting you to subsidize their “upgrades” for an infrastructure that’s essentially a sunk cost:”
Sure, in each region there are only a few major providers who collude to keep costs high and tech improvements minimal.
So it is bad for the state to improve tech, while you give examples how the US gov’t has successfully done so in the past, but you acknowledge the private providers are lazy and cheap.
A free market solution to this would require competitors who actually compete, both on price and services. This would mean not allowing big lazy companies to buy/sue their upstart competitors out of the market. And that requires government.
Government has a role whether you like it or not. If there is NO government things are going to suck as much, or more, than total government.
If you WANT Korea, China and India to kick America’s butt in the new economy, keep voting GOP.