The Internet is an important part of our lives. Nine out of ten times, the first application opened on a computer will be the Internet browser, which may be used to check Facebook or browse a headline or two on the New York Times. As appealing the Internet is to people, the speed at which we browse is a big part of what makes the internet attractive. Remember the days of dial-up? The internet was not as attractive then as it is now because it wasn’t efficient to browse the internet with transfer speeds of 56 kbits/s. Now we get transfer speeds of 5000 kbits/s, so browsers like you and I are content with what the Internet offers and the speeds we get them at.
As fast as South Korean connection’s are, currently the fastest internet connections globally, their governments aim to make it even faster. New York Times reports in an article that the South Korean government plans to pour billions of dollars into increasing internet speeds in homes up to 1 GB/sec by 2012. To put this number into perspective, Mark McDonald of the New York Times describes it as “more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.”
Seems like a pretty unreasonable proposition considering South Korea’s known internet addiction issues and its attempt to help net-addicted youth. Think back to the blog post regarding the South Korean couple letting their child die because of their infatuation with virtual daughter. As outrageous as it sounds to increase an already fast internet in a country where net addiction is clearly an issue, gigabit internet is apparently a necessity for the future. Don Norman, co-founder of one of the leading technological consultant companies Nielson Norman Group says, “We’re all going to be doing cloud computing, for example, and that won’t work if you’re not always connected. Games. Videoconferencing. Video on demand. All this will require huge bandwidth, huge speed.”
It’s common knowledge that as we continue to move forward, technology and the internet will become a larger portion of our lives. This movement to increase internet speeds in South Korea is being emulated in other countries like the US as President Obama unveils a multi-billion dollar broadband spending program in his January State of the Union address. I personally think that the billions of dollars being funneled into increasing internet speed can be better spent elsewhere. Will viewing a page 200 times faster than we do now going to make the browsing experience that much more enjoyable? As nice as having super fast internet would be, the world is facing much more pressing issues.
