It's been a day of tech talk on how broadband networks around the world are a mix of FTTN, VDSL, DOCSIS, Fibre and more, with Korea Telecom's own GiGA Wire tech very successful in Korea.
This presentation was made by Korea Telecom VP, Global Business Development Manager, Byungki Oh.
He started off by explaining how, back in 2004, Fortune Magazine spoke of Korea as a "broadband wonderland."
Korea started with ADSL in 1999, then VDSL at 12Mbps in 2002.
2004 saw the leap to 50Mbps, beating the government's goal by a year, and then hit 100Mbps in 2006, six years ahead of the Korean government's schedule.
Korea Telecom has 21 million households covered, nearly 80% of households in the country, and this equates to about a 41% market share for both fixed and wireless connectivity.
{loadposition alex08}The number of gigabit broadband subscribers - 3.6 million out of about 8 million, about 40% of our subscribers on gigabit speed.
On fibre, KT offers 1Gbps speeds, and on copper connectivity, which these days is the company's own G.hn or GiGA Wire technology, is around 700Mbps.
Here is the video of Byunki Oh's presentation, which is definitely worth watching in full. Below are some of the notes I took during his presentation.
You can see the introductory article to the Global Broadband Futures conference here.
The article with a video from NBN Public Affairs Manager Tony Brown, followed by NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow is here.
The article with the video from Deutsche Telekom CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn talking about delivering the "best broadband" is here.
All of the companies who spoke today explained that fibre was where the technology was going. KT's first deployment choice is fibre. If that's not possible, they look to see if they can implement LAN technology.
If that's not possible, then they look to copper, and with Korea Telecom's own GiGA Wire technology, which is very low interference compared with VDSL technology, this means KT can offer speeds as close to fibre can offer.
GiGA Wire has performance, commercial availability, viability, maximum speeds, maximum throughput, stability and service coverage, with excellent co-existence with competing DSL services and other carriers.
Korea Telecom also uses coaxial cable and powerline technologies to get GiGA Wire speeds into homes, and also into the other rooms of apartments, seeing as Wi-Fi can be blocked by walls.
So, what are the advantages of the GiGA Wire technology used by Korea Telecom?
Cost, Time, Coexistence, Scalability and expandability.
The presentation looked an at apartment block built in Seoul in 1996, with 216 households.
After installation with GiGa Wire modems, replacing VDSL modems - speeds went from less than 20Mbps to 850Mbps - much wider bandwidth, much lower transmission power.
Does not overlap with ADSL. It does overlap with VDSL but G.hn interface is low, compared to G.fast which has high interference with VDSL.
Using clock sharing, up to 256 subscribers could be supported.
We then get to expandability at home. Most people in Korea are living in apartments, Now people want an Internet connection in every room, despite wireless APs being available, they don't always penetrate well between walls.
With GiGa Wire - you can more easily produce multiple wired connections in homes, even via co-ax or power line.
Crosstalk avoidance technology uses a dynamic allocation of bandwidth, increases average throughput for customers.
So, what about field deployment?
We have covered 10% of DSL customers with GiGa Wire technologies. Heavily populated areas have the highest usage of GigaWire.
Performance - by 10 times. Average 78Mbps VDSL speed up to around 1Gpbs with GiGa Wire.
GiGA Wire has also been installed in Boston, USA ,and Gaborone, Botswana.
In thh US - GiGA Wire delivered speeds an average 15x times faster, from 36Mbps to 540.
In Bostwana, from 2Mbps to hundreds of megabits - see the video.
A hotel in Guam also trialled GiGA Wire - the tech was installed while the maid was cleaning the room - about 30 minutes installation time, which hotel owners really appreciated.
Future plans? Not focusing on one tech but saw value how we can upgrade our customers to Gigabit - we developed G.hn 1.0 in 2013, 2.0 in 2016 and 3.0 in 2018.
So, please watch the embedded video above for the full presentation, but no country out there is fully FTTP, not even South Korea, but a wide mix of technologies are being used to deliver super fast and ultra fast broadband speeds around the world today.