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American View On Korean Broadband Leadership

Posted by timothy on from the also-world-leader-in-delicious-food dept.

prostoalex writes "South Korea remains the world's undisputed broadband leader (in terms of penetration) with 25 broadband lines for every 100 people as of year-end 2004. But how did it come to that? Joel Strauch moved there to teach English and in his letter to PC World he portrays the everyday life in broadband heaven as well as names the reasons for Korean broadband dominance: 'An ambitious, nearly $11 billion program, it appears to be working. Studies have shown that over a quarter of Koreans have broadband and that anyone who wants it can sign up--with some ISPs charging as little as $19 a month for DSL. I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection--twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"

9 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. Yay for broadband! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We all know the importance of quickly downloaded porn and illegal games :)

    1. Re:Yay for broadband! by northcat · · Score: 4, Funny

      and Linux distros.

    2. Re:Yay for broadband! by ALpaca2500 · · Score: 1, Funny

      i bet a lot more people would use linux if it had porn pre-installed...

  2. Envy by rootX · · Score: 2, Funny

    I am so jealous. Cheap and ubiquitous.

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    -- sed s/liberty/profit/g US.Constitution
  3. Why so much broadband? by Nine+Tenths+of+The+W · · Score: 5, Funny

    You can play Starcraft perfectly well on a 56k line.

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    Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
  4. Re:appealing for americans... by ADRA · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have odds that when he declares war on Korea, he forgets which pole he's attacking, or just omit the geographic element all together.

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    Bye!
  5. Oh Lord, not Cyworld! by Chordonblue · · Score: 2, Funny

    I've never understood how endless pictures of folks flashing the peace sign could be so popular - but our Korean students manage to max out our bandwidth on sites just like Cyworld.

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    "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
  6. Re:Leadership? by mt+v2.7 · · Score: 1, Funny

    640k ram oughta be enough for anyone..

  7. I, for one, can imagine . . . by MisterSquid · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now, could you imagine what would happen if the US had a president that bet 100 billion on the internet?

    Yeah, he would would have been lobbied out of office by the MPAA.

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    blog