By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter

The telecommunications network in Korea will be 50 times faster than its current speed and will cover the entire nation by 2010.

The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) on Monday unveiled the plan to foster Broadband convergence Network (BcN) infrastructure.

The government will invest 2 billion won, together with 67 billion won from the private sector, in improving the quality of the broadband multimedia service covering the whole country.

Once the BcN project is completed, TV broadcasts, telecommunications and the Internet will be converged into one single network with transmission speeds of 50~100 Mbps, which is about 50 times faster than the current VDSL line used in many households.

Ubiquitous networking will also be available through BcN, whereby any electronic device, such as refrigerators or digital televisions, will be able to perform as a network console, thus enabling customers to use Internet anytime and anywhere.

The MIC said that for BcN to be successful, it must provide a high quality of service, security, and sufficient Internet protocol (IP) addresses using IPv6.

IPv6 is an enhanced address system, which provides almost limitless IP addresses while the current IPv4 system only has about 4.3 billion addresses and is expected to be full by 2006.

It is estimated that BcN will add value 95 trillion won to the economy as well as create new 370,000 jobs by 2010. The export of BcN-related products will also increase from the current $2.7 billion to $13.5 billion in 2010.

A special research team, consisting of 178 experts from various research labs and companies, compiled the report. The research team, which has been working on the project since May, will hold a series of seminars to finalize details of the project in December. The first seminar will be held today at the Seoul Hilton Hotel in downtown Seoul.

indizio@koreatimes.co.kr