Korean carriers to launch broadband-shaming 300Mbps network this year | Hacker News Reader

Korean carriers to launch broadband-shaming 300Mbps network this year

engadget.com

42 pointsbane44 comments

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...

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...

[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...)

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

Who needs a national id number when you have the NSA?

When you want to buy pretty much anything from a Korean website, you'll need one. (I don't think NSA would help you there.) Not necessarily your own number, it seems. Korean banks really believe in transparency and have repeatedly opened up millions of ID numbers for every hacker to use.

> 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.

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.

>If you only use IE for banking

But they don't.

Exploits can escape your browser sandbox.

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.

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.

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...

The middle of Australia is, technically speaking, "a hellish wasteland devoid of life". Meanwhile here in the Bay Area I'm lucky to get gsm on my phone when at home.

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

That big dot with all the coverage right in the middle called "Alice Springs". That's where he lives.

And Australia is a country with an overwhelmingly higher cost of living than almost everywhere in the US.

...and an overwhelmingly higher standard of living to go with that.

It's almost like the management of America's mobile carriers and pharmaceutical companies went to the same business schools, were members of the same fraternities and bribe the same senators or something.

Must be nice to live in a first world country.

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

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

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.

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...

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

> 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.

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.

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.

Note that New York city is a densely populated small city with a huge population. Still can't provide proper internet speeds.

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.

Which country/area would that be?

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... and a reddit discussion on the subject at that time here http://redd.it/1nz2ig (many comments)

Many countries have 1gbps (Hong Kong, Singapore, Turkey...) but only if Google does it in the US in a city or two does it get some public air time.

"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. :)

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.

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.

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 ...)

I currently get 100mbps on my cable connection in Australia of all places :)

The real question of course, is, if we ran speed tests to servers in Toronto and Australia, would we see the same results? ;-) Of course, this is where (a) we need faster server-room connections and (b) lots of jumbo frame support by default over the Internet. ;-)

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/

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.

> Yeah, right. What are they going to do with 300Mbps to a smartphone? 4k video?

well, think of it as phone-as-a-modem, or no expensive last-mile issues with taking fiber to the home and all that...

We are looking into low-latency Dual-Full HD video streaming for the next Sky Drone FPV solution with real 3D Oculus Rift support :) 300Mbps would come handy

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.

3rd generation rewrite of

http://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/detail.do?idx=1054

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com