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On Thu, 29 Apr 2010, Eion MacDonald wrote:
On 29/04/2010 17:12, Rob Beard wrote:I guess if you're shifting large CAD files across the world it'll still be quicker than posting them on CD/DVDUntil the Great (Fire) Wall of PRC stops delivery! DVD by DHL arrives within 6 to18 days depending on final leg of journey [some parts have only intermittent road transport]. However a very large capacity fibre optic main pipe runs up to Tibetan plateau and a wee village there with a cottage-industry-type design centre gets speeds we can only dream of. This is somewhat the same fast speeds in all major centres in South Korea from my clients reports.
It's far too easy to look at outher countries and say things like "Wow - look at them, they get X speed and it's Y times faster than ours"... You need to take the whole picture into account.
In places of high population density and state controlled Internet it's really trivial to run Gb fibre along the roads (because you the government dictate it be so and when the locals whinge about the roads being dug-up, you just shoot them, er....), and into blocks of flats - the bigger issues is then connecting that fast country-wide backbone to the rest of the world. Not always easy in a place like S. Korea or Japan. Where do you run the cables to? Not North or west, that's for sure...
One issue we have here in the UK is that it's now prohibitively expensive to dig up the roads - and there's something of a local resistance to that now oddly enough... (I've heard that every road in the Penwith peninsula has now been dug up at least once, and several times in some cases - knowing how narrow a lot of those roads are, I know the locals might not be too happy about having them dug-up again!!!)
Most cable co's have now gone defunkt, being absorbed by the bigger ones until - oh, only one left... And when was the last time you saw avonline digging up the roads for ntl/tw/vm round here?
The upside of having privatisation in the phone/networking industry is that it allows compeition - my VoIP company could not exist in South Africa for example, where the govt. own most of the telephone company and make VoIP illegal... The down-side is of-course having to please the greedy shareholders....
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html