Korea is hooked to the big pipe and sucking up the porn. Seoul Now reports:

On Nov. 6, the Korean government held a special ceremony to stress that the number of high-speed Internet subscribers surpassed the 10 million mark in October.

The ceremony was held at the headquarters building of the Ministry of Information and Communication in downtown Seoul, with the participation of President Kim Dae-jung.

The information ministry said in a statement that the country achieved the "incredible result" in just four years since the formal high-speed Internet service was launched in 1998.

It said the 10 million mark stresses the fact that Korea is "the No. 1 Internet nation" in the world.

....The number of broadband subscribers was 370,000 in 1999, 4.02 million in 2000 and 7.81 million in 2001. The 10 million mark was finally set in October this year.

The information ministry said about 98 percent of local administrative districts have high-speed Internet access, largely because ADSL utilizes existing copper wire telephone lines and tends to spread fast among local residents.

As of end-December last year, the high-speed Internet user rate in Korea is 17.16 percent, the largest in the world, followed by Canada (8.4 percent), Sweden (4.96 percent), the United States (4.47 percent) and Japan (2.23 percent).

The average of OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries is 2.9 percent, suggesting that Korea has indeed pulled off a faster-than-expected growth in the broadband market.

....The ubiquitous Internet access - at home, in the office and at tens of thousands of PC salons across the nation - have brought fresh sources of income to online game developers and portal operators.

Meanwhile, KT and Hanaro are also keen to upgrade and export their ADSL solutions and technologies. Their latest concern is how to kickstart the so-called VDSL (very high bit rate DSL), a next-generation high-speed Internet technology.

ADSL offers differing upload and download speeds and can be configured to deliver up to 6 Mbps (megabits of data per second) from the network to the customer - up to 120 times faster than dialup service and 100 times faster than ISDN.

ADSL enables voice and high-speed data to be sent simultaneously over the existing telephone line. Korea is now set to migrate from ADSL to VDSL in order to meet the rising demand for high-capacity multimedia content over the broadband network.

VDSL offers up to 26 Mbps - and some experts say 52 Mbps - over distances of up to 50 meters. Its optical fiber network infrastructure is particularly useful for campus environments and business parks. And the speed itself is what the information ministry aims to achieve in the next four years.

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