06-17-2015, 05:26 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Posts: 10,626
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jcyuhn
The problem is that 5% of users consume 95% of the bandwidth. Rate limiting unreasonably greedy consumers of bandwidth provides a better experience for all other users. Capping the consumption of greedy users permits the others to receive the service they are paying for. The network has finite bandwidth, it's only fair not to let a small subset of individuals consume the great majority of it.
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That sound reasonable until you visit other countries, where bandwidth isn't being monopolized by less than a handful of carriers.
Nearly all of Seoul’s residents use smartphones, and many of the services just now gaining in popularity in the United States have been commonplace in South Korea for years.
Much of this was made possible by two decades of enormous public investment. Seoul is blanketed with free Wi-Fi that offers the world’s fastest Internet speeds — twice as fast as the average American’s. Back in 1995, the government began a 10-year plan to build out the country’s broadband infrastructure and, through a series of public programs, to teach Koreans what they could do with it. South Korea also eased regulations on service providers to ensure that consumers would have a multitude of choices — in marked contrast to America, where a handful of cable and telecommunications monopolies dominate the market. Such healthy competition in Korea keeps the cost of access low.
To maintain South Korea’s lead, the country’s Science Ministry recently announced a $1.5 billion initiative to upgrade Korea’s mobile infrastructure. By 2020, the government predicts, it will be 1,000 times faster — so fast you could download a feature-length movie in approximately one second. In the same time frame, the Federal Communications Commission hopes to wire most American homes with broadband Internet with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, or roughly one-sixtieth of South Korea’s goal.
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