Interesting article about South Korea's upgrade to 1000Mbps fibre optic broadband on the BBC today, which contrasts that with what the UK is doing. I didn't cover it in our news because we tend to stick firmly to fully UK focused stories.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9093991.stm
It's a useful question though, can we really benefit from such speeds? Certainly not yet we can't, maybe in the distant future, but I note that the BBC, as is so often the case, failed to consider a number of crucial issues when talking about speed.
1. They neglect the age old 'Advertised' vs 'Real-World' speed dilemma. Sure South Korea already has 100Mbps connectivity, yet even the most optimistic studies shows that the national average download rate is around 20-30Mbps. More pessimistic ones put it at 6-10Mbps. It can't do 100Mbps reliably but they want 1000Mbps? Where's the logic.
2. Most internet services, not even YouTube, the BBC or Microsoft's servers, could take advantage of such speed. The vast majority of servers and websites restrict their per-connection rates to many.. many times less for load balancing.
3. People are quick to forget that the national backbone fibre optic links between operators and connections between countries aren't actually all that big. Installing domestic 1Gbps isn't going to provide any benefit to content transferred over longer distances, which will be throttled by nature of the physical infrastructure.
Now don't get me wrong, 1Gbps at an affordable price would be amazing, but South Korea and one or two other countries are the exception not the rule. Every country has a different structure and the comparison with SK is always an annoying one. I think it's better to look towards places like Sweden, which also has a lot of FTTH in the ground but is a closer budgetary comparison to ourselves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9093991.stm
It's a useful question though, can we really benefit from such speeds? Certainly not yet we can't, maybe in the distant future, but I note that the BBC, as is so often the case, failed to consider a number of crucial issues when talking about speed.
1. They neglect the age old 'Advertised' vs 'Real-World' speed dilemma. Sure South Korea already has 100Mbps connectivity, yet even the most optimistic studies shows that the national average download rate is around 20-30Mbps. More pessimistic ones put it at 6-10Mbps. It can't do 100Mbps reliably but they want 1000Mbps? Where's the logic.
2. Most internet services, not even YouTube, the BBC or Microsoft's servers, could take advantage of such speed. The vast majority of servers and websites restrict their per-connection rates to many.. many times less for load balancing.
3. People are quick to forget that the national backbone fibre optic links between operators and connections between countries aren't actually all that big. Installing domestic 1Gbps isn't going to provide any benefit to content transferred over longer distances, which will be throttled by nature of the physical infrastructure.
Now don't get me wrong, 1Gbps at an affordable price would be amazing, but South Korea and one or two other countries are the exception not the rule. Every country has a different structure and the comparison with SK is always an annoying one. I think it's better to look towards places like Sweden, which also has a lot of FTTH in the ground but is a closer budgetary comparison to ourselves.























