{patrickrice.net blog}

Ireland’s great broadband project, to empower the poor misfortunates out in the “sticks” that’s country to you or me, Is happening again, with another minister for communications present.It provides a great photo op for some nice people in the leafy suburbs of Dublin to give their country cousins cake, in this case let them eat 30Mbs.

So how are we going to eat 30Mbs? Or more to the point how are we going to make the 30Mbs cake:

we we could use:

LTE (telecommunication)

LTE Advanced – the successor to LTE

WiMAX – a competitor to LTE

HSPA+ -an enhancement of the 3GPP HSPA standard

and that’s just the wireless options

Or we could just learn from the South Koreans http://gigaom.com/broadband/south-korea-europe-rule-planet-broadband/ where they have a rate of over 17Mbs and have been at the top of the broadband charts for years, you should think about that when you connection fails or that movie that your are trying to download slows to a snails pace. So what do the Koreans use to make there broadband fast? well they use VDSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL), it runs over standard copper lines.

On the wireless side we should be also looking to Korea cause they have 100% wireless broadband in the country also (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57477593-94/south-korea-hits-100-mark-in-wireless-broadband/)

So why bother,well it seems to be a case of get with it or get out of it, looking at how Korea uses its technology in education, could be a simple justification for using broadband getting us to these high levels of Internet speeds, for example south Korea are moving away from paper based exams to electronic based exams, Sick children do not miss out on class, cause they can watch their teacher from their bed using IP TV (http://www.advancedtechnologykorea.com/8000).

But back to Ireland, so how are we going to do it, well if  you look at table 2 on the national broadband plan (http://www.dcenr.gov.ie/Communications/Communications+Policy/Next+Generation+Broadband/), you can see DSL flat lining after 2010, so it looks like nothing has happend there, and mobile has grown in a big way up to about 600k on a par with DSL at about 800k, so it looks like we’re going to have to go 50% wireless 50% fixed line…..but we want speed, and the only way to get speed is with Fibre, accross the pond Google are showing us the way with their Fibre role out in Kansas http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.ie/2012/09/building-180-fiberhoodsconstruction.html I think there may be a lesson here, Google haven’t used wireless, they are using Fiber, and the simple reason is that it’s faster, less complicated, and standardised, after all is been with us since 1966, so maybe it might be time to replace the phone cables throught out the country with optical cables!