I thought my broadband was fast, but in Korea & Japan...?!! (1 Viewer)

[Peter Kim]

Using Bandwidth Place or DSL Reports, I get an average of 1700 kilobits per second (kbps) and many times a peak of 2200 kbps.

However, CNN states that Japan and South Korea lead the world by a huge margin - 26,000 kbps. To translate:

A Japanese user can download an entire movie over the Internet in 20 minutes. South Korea is almost as fast -- 26 minutes.

"You can download a movie faster than you can watch it," said Reynolds.

But the rest of the world is considerably slower. It takes six hours to get a movie in the United States and 12 hours in Switzerland. For somebody trying to download it over a standard dial-up modem, it would take 71/2 days.

And unlike the general rule where everything is much more expensive in Japan, the cost of this ultrabroadband is a paltry $29.14/month. The avg. cost of our snail's pace broadband here in the US is $52.99/month.

This very low cost coupled with much more apparent speed and utility has led to a broadband penetration of 60-70% of all households in S. Korea, not just from a pool of computer households. In other words, there are 21.3 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants in S. Korea.

I hope we in the US can someday enjoy the speeds they find normal in Asia. I know when I jumped from dial-up to Comcast cable, I was impressed with the speedup. I cannot imagine why I would need to fly through the Web at a rate of 10-15x greater than what I experience now. However, if content providers (e.g., AOL, Disney, Apple, etc.) want to seriously deliver via the net, I guess they'll need to do something to ramp up the speed in order to make the offerings palatable.

CNN article - S. Korea leads world in Net speed

 

[Joe Szott]

Their population density allows for some of this wow factor. Since DSL is very distance sensitive, wiring up a high density city block is much easier than wiring up a suburb of say Chicago. It isn't actually 'easier', but the amount of subscribers/money you can get back from the urban one is many times greater. So you invest a lot of money in that area.

It'll get there in the US, just takes some time. Who even knew what broadband was 10 years ago?

 

[David Baranyi]

I wonder what the MPAA would think about increased broadband speed in the United States?

 

[Peter Kim]

Joe,

I can see how population density/distance from DSL center affects broadband penetration. But what the article fails to mention is why the speeds are 10 - 15 times greater than the US.

I can only vaguely recall an article in which it discussed prevalent use of fiber optics as opposed to the traditional cable in this country...but I'm not sure.

 

[Alex-C]

Who even knew what broadband was 10 years ago?

The Breeders. 7 Year Bitch. Belly. There was tons of broad bands....sheesh !

 

[Matt Stryker]

The biggest problem in the US will be no one wants to pay for the upstream bandwidth. I'm sure cable and DSL companies will soon tout 10 MB/s and even 25 MB/s connections, but if you hit a T3 at the central office to go out to the world, it doesn't mean squat.

Of course, they probably won't mention that in their fliers. Those DSL speed tests really only reveal the upstream limitations when you run them in the early evening to a server that is not inside your ISP...then you'll see the true capacity.

 

[Chris Bardon]

1700 kb DSL? That's pretty impressive. I suppose that the 3 Mb technology is out there-it just isn't offered in my area yet. Sure, Sympatico thinks it is, but I know from experience that it's easier said than done.

Still, I'm happy with my 1.5 Mb connection, which is averaging 1.3 Mb on Bandwidthplace. Much more stable speed than cable... Still, 26 Mb/s speeds-that can't be DSL, can it?

 

[MickeS]

Yeah, it is. There are distance limitations though, like you have to live very close to the base stations to get this speed. But speeds of around 10 Mb/s are easier to get.
This is pretty common in Sweden, a country with not very high population density, so I don't think that's the problem. Of course, not everyone would be able to get it, but most US cities could easily get that speed for most of its residents.

I'm not sure what keeps the US from getting higher speeds.

 

[John_Berger]

I'm not sure what keeps the US from getting higher speeds.

$$$$, what else? The local phone monopolies are unwilling to upgrade their equipment (while giving millions in bonuses to their CxOs. Additionally, they're unwilling to admit that ther are hundreds of millions miles of dark (unused) fiber optic cables throughout the country that could easily be used because then there would be a massive consumer backlash of "why weren't these fibers activated earlier if they've been around for years?" and of course the extra money for hardware to implement those fibers that could only come out of firing workers or reducing the bonuses of execs. We know which one is more likely.

It's all about money. And if there is one thing that recent American business history has shown is that the customer does NOT come first. This is so true with broadband companies.

 

[Chris Bardon]

Want to make a bet on that?

John, I see what you mean about throttling, but I know from trying the 3Mb service that there are distance issues that prevent my modem from connecting at those speeds.

I'm coming at this from a Canadian perspective (we have a much higher proportion of broadband users here), but I think that the reason you're not seing faster broadband speeds at this point is because the providers want to ensure a universality of service. Sure, there may be unused fiber in Toronto, but not necessarily here in Waterloo (about an hour outside of Toronto). Bell wants to sell their DSL service in both places, so it's easier for them to offer exactly the same service in both loccations rather than 1.5 Mb here, and say 7-10 Mb in Toronto. Similarly, they don't want to say you can get 5 Mb if you're within X km of the server, 3 Mb if you're between X and Y and so on. This way, providers can offer the same service to a larger group of people, and not have to deal with customers complaining that the equipment in their area needs to be upgraded.

Actually, this is a little off topic, but do we really NEED faster download speeds? I consider myself a heavy internet user, and download a LOT of stuff, and I'm fine with 1.5 Mb DSL. Maybe it's just because I've been conditioned to believe that large files take a long time (or maybe it's just that I'm still thinking back to 2400 baud modems), but that speed tends to work for me. There are still bottlenecks futher down the line in many cases that keep you from getting data faster, so in effect higher bandwidth ends up being nothing more than a bragging right.

The other consequence of broadband is that, at least from the web end, content expands to fill it, and this is not always a good thing. Websites don't NEED to have sound, flash, animation, etc-they need information. A perfect example is www.fox.com/24. Last season, I just wanted to find out if there was a new episode of 24 in a given week, but instead only found the flash animated hell that they try to pass off as a website. Same deal with the official Simpsons website-too much flash, too hard to find the information your'e looking for. There really needs to be a grassroots back-to-basics approach to web design movement...

 

[MickeS]

But the bottlenecks are there precisely because of that kind of reasoning!

 

[Bill Griffith]

Where do you guys check your speeds?

I've checked my online at DSL Reports, or speed check and I get rates of 3 Mbs +, on a consistant basis, any time of the day.

I'm running Cable though not DSL.

 

[John_Berger]

I'm running Cable though not DSL.

Cable is consistently faster; however, there are obvious shortfalls to cable, not the least of which is that you can be impacted by others' activities (although that can be said about DSL to an extent). Keep in mind also that cable companies are the ones who are jumping on the bullsh*t bandwagon of blocking incoming ports arbitrarily and forcing customers to pay for higher bandwidth usage. (Don't get me started on the last part. That's a thread in itself.)

 

[Carlo_M]

My old apartment that I lived in for three years used to average between 1800-2300kbps via Adelphia Cable Modem (and no, in 3 years I never ever experienced the dreaded Cable Modem Slowdown despite living in Los Angeles). My new apt averages a paltry 1100 via Verizon DSL.

Those Japan and S. Korea numbers are staggering though. I work at a university with crazy speeds (I'm hooked up via 100MBps to the campus backbone) and I only score 13000 on those 2wire tests.