From a naive viewpoint, this sort of thing may have motivated some
unwary souls to back the Lightsquared proposal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/te...oadband22.html
"South Korea already boasts the world’s fastest Internet connections —
the fastest globally by far — but that is hardly good enough for the
government here.
The country intends to connect every home in the country to the
Internet at one gigabit per second by the end of 2012. That would be a
tenfold increase from its already blazing national standard today and
more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the
United States.
.. . . The South Korean project will also increase wireless broadband
services tenfold.
.. . . South Koreans now pay an average of $38 a month for connections
at 100 megabits per second to the Internet, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay
$46 for service that is molasses by comparison."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ne/9093991.stm
"The government is encouraging enterprise to spend the 34 trillion Won
(£19bn), required to complete the scheme. By way of a comparison, that
figure is roughly the same as the nation's annual education budget.
In theory, this idea will give many homes in South Korea a connection
speed 500 times faster than is guaranteed in the UK.
In practice, South Korea is already considered the country quickest
for broadband. The current average connection, according to a report
by web firm Akamai, is 12Mbps - the highest in the world.
.. . . only 10% of data transfer is through 3G networks, 70% coming
through wi-fi - which is not that surprising when you consider the
number of hotspots in South Korea's urban areas."
There may be darker motives in the Lightsquared case, but what was
that old saying about a road paved with good intentions?