
Korean carriers to launch broadband-shaming 300Mbps network this year - bane
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/20/sk-telecom-lte-a-300-mbps/?ncid=rss_truncated
======
chimeracoder
On the other hand, South Koreans are required (by law) to use Internet
Explorer 8 or earlier for online transactions[0], and they are required to
register for many (perhaps all) websites with user-generated content using
their unique national ID number (sort of the Korean counterpart to a Social
Security number)[1].

This is due to a law passed in the late 90s, in the name of security. Perhaps
it once worked, but it clearly doesn't today: [http://www.zdnet.com/bank-data-
of-20-million-customers-leake...](http://www.zdnet.com/bank-data-
of-20-million-customers-leaked-in-south-korea-7000025332/)

They have very extensive censorship of websites - not "just" pornographic, but
also those that are "subvserive" or "harmful to minors". In combination with
the aforementioned "citizen identity number" law, this has been used to
suppress political dissent and/or protest.[2]

Much as I wish I could do better than my molasses-esque Time Warner connection
at home, I'll savor my freedom in the US to the extent I can.

[0] [http://www.zdnet.com/south-koreans-use-internet-explorer-
its...](http://www.zdnet.com/south-koreans-use-internet-explorer-its-the-
law-7000022827/)

[1] (There are exceptions, and the full realities are a bit more complicated,
but it's bad enough that virtually everyone uses some form of Internet
Explorer: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/due-to-
secu...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/due-to-security-law-
south-korea-is-stuck-with-internet-explorer-for-online-
shopping/2013/11/03/ffd2528a-3eff-11e3-b028-de922d7a3f47_story.html))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea)

~~~
10feet
> Internet Explorer 8 or earlier for online transactions

This could actually be incredibly safe and a good idea. If you only use IE for
banking, and use the other browsers for everything else, you will be a lot
more secure than someone who uses Firefox or Chrome for both.

~~~
lstamour
Just a reminder, this /is/ HN. "[using IE8 or earlier] ... incredibly safe and
a good idea" \-- them's fightin' words. Now, I'm not going to say that
diversity isn't a bad thing, but I will say that diversification using older
browsers and ActiveX controls where everyone is forced to use the same browser
and so is not actually diverse at all ... well, that's where things go south.
If most people set their default browser to non-IE and as a consequence are
forced to type in their bank's URL directly rather than click a link to get
there, fine. If most people choose, unwisely, not to do so, then they're more
vulnerable to phishing attacks that additionally might add malware. If most
people are required to use Windows, and therefore cannot use Mac or Linux
under the current implementations, then again that restriction on diversity is
bad for the self-defence of the system as a whole.

Finally, what you're really getting at is "use Incognito tabs for banking," as
those by default don't load plugins that can sniff or execute on pages nor
retain cookies for later CSRF. Sadly, safety is a moving target and browsers
and OSes have moved on since late 1990s.

------
kyle_t
After travelling/living in Southeast Asia for 8 months and paying between
$5-10/month for LTE speeds that are consistently more reliable and quicker
than in the USA it makes me shudder when I get my bill every month for $100+
for two lines. Granted there are differences i.e labor costs and total land
area coverage, but on the whole the price difference doesn't make up for it.

~~~
grecy
A guy visiting from nowhere in Australia was telling us how he gets twice the
minutes, unlimited texts and twice the data on LTE+ for about 1/2 of what it
costs in the USA.

~~~
rxdazn
you don't even get edge when you're in the middle of nowhere in Australia,
much less LTE.

e.g: [http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/coverage-
networks/ou...](http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/coverage-networks/our-
coverage/)

~~~
10feet
You don't get anything in the middle of Australia, because nobody lives or
goes there. It is a desert.

------
promptcritical
Must be nice to live in a first world country.

~~~
res0nat0r
Note that South Korea is smaller than the state of Kentucky. I'm sure
geography has a small part to do with it.

~~~
promptcritical
I'm sure it does. I'm from West Virginia, by the way, where federal stimulus
money for broadband expansion ($24 million) got funneled to Verizon Network
Integration to put routers in libraries. They used $22,600 dollar Cisco
3945's.

I'm sure corruption, regulatory capture, incompetent politicians, and
oligopolies have something to do with it too.

[http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201205050057](http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201205050057)

~~~
res0nat0r
I remember this story when it came out, but a single citation involving Cisco
networking equipment is in no way relevant when comparing an already
culturally wired country smaller than the state of Kentucky, and trying to
extrapolate that should somehow be a viable option next month for Comcast to
start laying down multimode fibre across 3.7 million square miles of land.

Yes Google Fiber has been a great success where it has been deployed so far,
but that has relied on local government cooperation, incentives, right of
ways, also neighborhood signup rates > $X for the rollout to even begin to
happen. So just because South Korea can do this doesn't mean you should think
somehow Comcast can roll 300 Megabit lines to the whole country.

Or you can believe they can roll that out to your local densely populated
metro block, where 99% of your neighbors will then laugh at the price, and you
can subsidize their non-payment with your $500/month bill.

~~~
promptcritical
First of all, I don't think anyone (least of all Comcast) is going to roll
anything out "next month." This is not a new issue for the US (having crappy
broadband). This article [1] talks about what came of the $200 billion the
government gave away to telcos to help build out our infrastructure since 1990
(spoiler: nothing came of it)... and the article is from 2007 so the total
giveaway is even more at this point. So I don't think this is a new problem
that we are suddenly looking at "next month" solutions for.

Secondly, there is no incentive for anyone (again least of all Comcast) to
roll out anything next month, next year, or next decade that would
significantly improve broadband in the US. For that you would need meaningful
competition. We don't have that here. That's why idiots like TW cable's CFO
can say things like "nobody wants gigabit internet" [2] and all that happens
is the tech media gets ruffled feathers for a few days. Why on earth would
Comcast roll out anything other than what they already have? What are their
customers going to do if they don't like it? Go to satellite? Slower but maybe
more stable DSL?

Yeah, it was one anecdote, but it was one that highlights the political
incompetence and corporate graft that help hold us back from having nice
things.

[1]
[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html)

[2] [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/time-warner-
cab...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/time-warner-cable/)

~~~
res0nat0r
> For that you would need meaningful competition. We don't have that here.

We also don't have a majority of customers who want to pay more than $40/month
for internet.

Comcast has been rolling out decent internet, I currently have 105 megabit
internet and I'm in a suburb, but it isn't cheap. I think many in the HN
bubble over estimate the number of people who they think will pay for the
monthly fee it would take for a company to roll out super fast internet in a
place as large as the USA, even if it is just limited to major cities and
their suburbs.

~~~
promptcritical
Inside or out of the HN bubble, if Comcast had real competition you wouldn't
be paying nearly as much for your 105 megabit connection. You're kinda making
my point.

~~~
res0nat0r
Sure about that? I'm not sure if a country the size of 1/50th of the USA can
be easily comparable when it comes to physical infrastructure sunk costs.

------
salient
I get 1 Gbps for less than $20 where I live (Europe), and unlimited bandwidth,
but I'm not bothering with the extra speed yet because I'm going to need a
good 802.11ac router and an SSD-enabled laptop to take full advantage of it.

So I'll wait a year longer or so until 1+ Gbps Wi-Fi arrives in laptops and
also in routers (second wave of 802.11ac routers will do that, first wave
isn't quite there yet). By then SSD prices should be a little lower, too.

~~~
teh_klev
Which country/area would that be?

~~~
misterjinx
I'm pretty sure he's talking about Romania. You can read more about this here
[http://business-review.eu/featured/rcs-rds-offers-highest-
fi...](http://business-review.eu/featured/rcs-rds-offers-highest-fixed-
internet-speeds-on-the-market-starting-november/) and a reddit discussion on
the subject at that time here [http://redd.it/1nz2ig](http://redd.it/1nz2ig)
(many comments)

------
lstamour
"Broadband-shaming 300Mbps"? Speak for yourself, as that happens to be my
current broadband speed over plain copper cable. Sure, I'm living a few years
ahead of most people, but it is a lot easier to roll out LTE than other forms
of Internet. I just wish that, like Wi-fi, your service didn't degrade as
quickly the more people connected to it. I remember back in the day, when no
one had LTE up here in Canada, it was routine to see speeds of 60-150mbps.
Now, less so. Depends on where you are, what device you have, a whole host of
factors. Of course, more spectrum is always nicer, not so much for marketing
purposes as here but to ensure there's enough space for everyone to get more
of the shared pool of bandwidth available. I'm sure if I ran LTE speed tests
under a tower at 2 AM I'd get some amazing results too. :)

~~~
jrockway
I used Sprint's 4G network before there were any 4G phones. It was wonderful.
Then the 4G phones started being launched, and it didn't work at all. It was
kind of sad, because the speeds were great.

~~~
techsupporter
Back when Xohm was still a thing (and still only in Baltimore), I did the
trick of ordering a Xohm modem and using a billing address in Baltimore while
physically using the device in Dallas. The IP and reverse DNS showed I was
connecting to a Sprint 4G-enabled tower well before Dallas was supposed to
have service.

It was screamingly fast. I think I topped out at 65Mbps down and 40Mbps up.
It's amazing how fast the network goes with no other load.

~~~
lstamour
Yeah, it's too bad carriers always speed test _before_ they launch the
network, then say those are the speeds you get. That it also depends on which
bands your phone supports if GSM, is also interesting. I suspect in the near
future I'll be upgrading phones not because they're any faster for CPU, but
because they support newer networking bands and technologies (like cable
modems being DOCSIS 3 8x4, 16x4, 24x8 and soon DOCSIS 3.1 ...)

------
11thEarlOfMar
Yeah, right. What are they going to do with 300Mbps to a smartphone? 4k video?
That means that 4k phones are coming soon, too, right?

Right: [http://bgr.com/2013/11/06/samsungs-4k-smartphone-
displays/](http://bgr.com/2013/11/06/samsungs-4k-smartphone-displays/)

~~~
kalleboo
Why to smartphones? Imagine a laptop with this built-in. No more hunting for
and connecting to insecure WiFi in cafés. Background iCloud backups/Mail sync
when the laptop is in sleep.

------
ksec
What is so Broadband Shaming about it? In Reality if you live inside even a
small size village you are very unlikely to get 300Mbps to yourself. Factor in
radio frequency distortion I would be surprise if you could even get a
constant 100Mbps.

Unless you are from US where i heard broadband are pretty bad.

------
benologist
3rd generation rewrite of

[http://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/detail.do?idx=1054](http://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/detail.do?idx=1054)

------
XorNot
This is an iirelevancy. You'll never see this type of speed in the real world,
since to do it they're combining 3-channels. Meaning 1 tower, servicing 1
person per antenna sector will manage it, but that'll be it.

~~~
jrockway
I believe the speed increases are due to better beamforming algorithms, which
use multiple fixed antennas to behave like one or more directional antennas at
the same time. The idea being that the antenna only sends power in a small
cone to your device and only hears responses from inside that small cone. This
lets you fit many users onto the same frequency space, since they can't hear
each other and each have the full slice of spectrum and time to themselves.
It's space multiplexing, as opposed to time and code multiplexing that's
currently widely used.

(The problem is that this requires really good digital signal processing.
Normally we make directional antennas by putting bits of metal around the
driven element that pick up the signal and re-radiate it out of phase. These
work really well, and you probably have on on your roof to receive TV signals.
But beamforming does this all in software, using a number of actual antennas
to radiate out-of-phase to increase power in a certain direction. The reverse
is true for receive; correlating phase information to "hear" a signal only
from a certain direction. One direction is easy, but 100 directions is hard.
That's where better DSP equates to more "bandwidth" for mobile phones.)

802.11n contains rudimentary beamforming, but the state of the art for
software signal processing on $5 commodity chips is not amazing, and of
course, the 2.4GHz ISM band is basically unusable because there is so much
interference from non-beamforming (etc.) devices. 802.11ac improves this
incrementally with better hardware. So it makes sense that at carrier grade
budgets and with dedicated spectrum, good beamforming is possible. If so, and
that's what this is, I totally believe 300MBps.

802.11ac has a 256QAM mode that can do almost 1Gbps. Of course, on the 2.4GHz
band, you'll never hear 16 levels of signal over all the noise. But with
dedicated spectrum, things change.

(This is mostly secondhand knowledge, so take it with a grain of salt. My
cubemate at work is a WiFi expert :) I'm just a ham who is happy making QSOs
at 31.25baud with PSK31.

------
notastartup
Having lived in Korea, it really doesn't matter if they make it 1000mbps. Porn
is blocked (thanks to the hardworking volunteer force of Korean moms and
grandmas keeping children and husbands safe from the filth that would make
Confucius nosebleed), freedom of speech has consequences (since your social
security number is required), much of the Korean web space is still stuck in
early 2000s with an odd hint of George Orwellian theme to it.

I think that I would have the same level of joy if I heard that North Korea
decided to make 1000Mbps line for their dedicated network of Juche websites
focusing on every aspect of Dear Leader.

I'm guessing they require you to enter your korean social security number in
hopes that it would not be possible for a North Korean spy to infiltrate the
landscape of online shopping and girly music videos. Ironic, because ActiveX
vulnerabilities give North Korean spies far more data and with far more ease.

