Fiber to the Home in the Mountains of Gangwon Province

Since 2004 my wife and I have enjoyed dependable DSL service, courtesy of Korea Telecom, at our small house in the mountains of Gangwon Province.  It was initially installed during a Winter snowstorm by a young KT technician (see my earlier post and photograph as proof).
After years of dependable DSL service, the modem provided by KT suddenly went dead two weekends ago.  We made an appointment for another technician to come out yesterday and I thought he would simply replace the DSL modem.  Instead, he climbed up to a box on a nearby telephone pole, strung fiber optic cable from it to our house, and connected KT's Fiber to The Home (FTTH) modem.  All of this took approximately an hour.   No charge for the service and no change to our current service, except that we're getting faster speeds on the fiber!
For the record, this is our most recent experience of customer service from one of Korea's major service providers.

A New Boom in Undersea Cable Laying

The Economist reports, based on a Telegeography study, that there is a new boom in the laying of undersea fiber optic cable. This one is smaller than the boom that peaked in 2001 when network operators such as Global Crossing spent nearly $13.5 billion laying undersea cables (see graphic). That boom turned to bust. However, according to Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography, the current boom is much more rooted in reality. Above all, demand is now indeed growing fast, driven by video and music traffic. Between 2002 and 2007, worldwide demand for international bandwidth grew at an average rate of 52% a year. Nevertheless, today less than a quarter of the fibre-optic strands on the chief undersea routes have been “lit”, or switched on. The need for bandwidth is not the only reason for laying cable. In addition, network operators need back-up connections and alternative routes in case cables get cut, which often happens.