Korean broadband to reach 1 Gbps by 2012

Indonesian broadband to reach 1 Gbps by?

This is so unfair, by 2012 the UK will be sitting on a max speed of some 50mb & Korea will be on 1GB...

Dear internet infrastructure eggheads & politicians, the UK need more frigging bandwith, get on with it!

P.S.

I don't give a flying hoot about the credit crunch, give me bandwidth and I shall give you many much squids, geddit?

damn 3rd world contry lagging behind so much. We've had 1Gbps connections here in Big T for years already.

Yes, and who else but those that will be throttled would ever need such speed? (in 95% of cases)

And most of the US is at less then 1mbg if that. Up until a short time ago Us gov't considered a 56kb modem broadband. This country is going to hell in a handbag as cable/phone providers renew thier monopolies.

That's it, I'm moving to Korea. We'll probably not get 1GBit/sec this side of 2020 at this rate here in old Blighty. It's high time Ofcom got some balls and gave BT/Virgin Media/LLU operators etc a kick up the arse to provide something a tad better.

Rob

That's not quite right. We won't be looking at even 50Mbit/s by 2012: we'll just be guaranteed about 2Gbit/s all over the country, mostly via cobbled together wi-fi system. No-one is ever going to pay for it in the UK, so we will lag behind other countries until it we're losing billions in business to it, then we'll build an overpriced, undersped network which won't cover much outside of London or other major areas. In short, it would take LEGAL ACTION or INTERVENTION by the Government to give the UK a decent network. Perhaps we can encourage a Japanese or Korean telecom to force a hostile takeover of British Telecom and upgrade our entire telephone network system all over the country to fibre optic? Just a hopeful thought.

Based on speed, US is definitely a third world country, and so sad that I live there and posting this message with my 3mbps "broadband".

First, Steve is the only person who managed to write all units right. That says a lot about The Inquirer, and the readers.
If you write nonsense like "mbps", then you are the prime target of phony telcos. Sorry.

Second, I agree with Steve that nothing will change unless the governments in the UK and elsewhere are being forced to realize that a country's infrastructure is one of the few backbones of its economy. IMHO that has to begin with the way how network access is being granted. Today we have telcos granting us limited network access for cash. Hundreds of years ago, robber barons controlled access to rivers and streets the same way. Since the telcos are already highly subsidized by the tax payers, why not give free network access to everybody without the modern robber barons in-between? Service providers could still offer services ontop of that, like an entertainment program. Nothing wrong with a free choice, is there?

Without fast broadband there won't be services that utilise it. Without the services there is no demand. We're heading nowhere.

What we need is someone to take a chance, be a visionary, maybe launch a blazing fast network with a good service to go with it. A quality tv/music on demand thingy. Maybe sky/virgin/bt could work together.

Either that or the government just pays for it most of it. As others have said, it'll probably end up that way and as everyone knows anything handled by the government is bound to suck. 2Mb/sec for everyone by 2012 here we come :(

I live in the newest city in the UK - Milton Keynes. It's a brand new house too. My only option for a broadband is DSL which can go 1.4Mbps max because of distance restrictions. Pathetic!!

I work for Openreach (Used to be known as BT engineers) and live in Milton Keynes. MK has one of the worst infostructures in the UK. We have had the letter for reduncies with a years payout but I have been told recently that no one within this area will be going as we are perfectly balanced. The reason for this is that managers think within the next 12-18 months it will pick up work and that could be down to BT wanting to start putting fiber in the network. This will not mean everyone will get 100MB lines only new estates with FTTH (Fiber to the house) what every one else will get is FTTC (Fiber to the cab the green things on teh side of the road) which you will be looking at speeds of 40-60 again depending on line length and quailty after the cab as copper will still be used. So even if we do get fiber it won't be speeds of what other countries get.

And one last thing only BT will be using the fiber so if you don't like BT you have no chance and will still have to use copper from exchange to house

My parents were happy today because they received a letter from Bell Canada stating that they would finally be provided with DSL lines in their neighbourhood late this summer.

I hate how this sites compares the broadband speed of a tiny little country to the speed to the average Broadband speed of the United States! They are 45 times larger in land mass than Korea! The infrastructure isn't just hooking up one bundle of fiber from one end to the other with a few hubs in the middle. The USA is huge and requires a lot more planning!

They're pretty much getting everything upgraded. Theyre gonna get lines capable of sending Ultra High Definition TV to every household.... Those TV's arent even for sale yet.

Something else to consider is half of South Korea's entire population is in one metro area. That would certainly reduce the distance to run cables.

There are already 80 million miles of fiber optic cable in the United States and the job isn't done! Building that kind of infrastructure on almost four million square miles is not going to happen overnight.

What a waste. All they'll use it for is playing Diablo II and Starcraft. You could use dial-up for those!

This makes me cry.

Are you kidding me?
You're a stereotype ...
you think they just play games?
they have 100's of downloading services web based and p2p, just for themselves! and guess what, their ALL profitable. Doesn't that make you think that this new speed won't be wasted?

Oh and unlike US who just got a 250gb cap on commcast, internet capping doesn't exist in Korea. Doesn't that make you drool? and to think it only costs $30 for the best residential plan in korea at the moment =].

You can criticize the idea of a 1gig connection, but you can't hide the fact that it's amazing and that you're gonna want to try it.