As the United States looks at an interactive map that shows huge gaps in broadband service coverage, the world is looking again at South Korea where the government has initiated a project to provide 1 gigabit speeds to every home in the country by the end of 2012.
It's not a whiteboard exercise. The government has already started a trial with 5,000 households in five South Korean cities where customers are being charged about $27 a month for the service. The new service would be 10 times faster than what South Korea already provides and about 200 times faster than what's available to the average user in the U.S.
"A lot of Koreans are early adopters and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3D TV, Internet protocol TV, high definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra high definition TV, cloud computing," said Choi Gwang-gi, the engineer in charge of the expansion plan.
For more:
- the New York Times has this story
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