Internet in South Korea

South Korea is the world leader in Internet connectivity, having the world's fastest average internet connection speed. About 45 million people or 92.4% of the population are Internet users, this shows how the nation has a substantial relationship with their digital space. It has consistently ranked first worldwide in the UN ICT Development Index since it launched. The government established policies and programs that facilitated the rapid expansion and use of broadband.

South Korea leads in the number of DSL connections per head worldwide. ADSL is standard, but VDSL has started growing quickly. ADSL commonly offers speeds of 3 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s, with VDSL accordingly faster. The large proportion of South Korea's population living in apartment blocks helps the spread of DSL, as does a high penetration of consumer electronics in general. Many apartment buildings in built-up metropolitan areas, such as Seoul and Incheon, have speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. VDSL is commonly found in newer apartments while ADSL is normally found in landed properties where the telephone exchange is far away.

The Internet has a higher status for many Koreans than it does in the West, and the government actively supports this. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation South Korea's internet is the most developed in the world. Particularly Seoul, the nation's capital, has been called "the bandwidth capital of the world". In January 2006, it became the first country to achieve over 50% broadband penetration per capita. By 2005, it was the first country to complete the conversion from dial-up to broadband. It also has the cheapest, fastest broadband in the world. Now there are experiments with speeds of 1 Gigabit per second. Additionally, in 2005 96.8% of South Korean mobile phones had Internet access.

There are 3 major ISPs. They are KT Corp, SKBroadband, and LGU+ (previously DACOM) and provides the broadband and the dedicated Internet circuit including Ethernet and operating Internet data centers in Seoul. Major MSOs are TBroad, C&M, and CJ Hello vision.

As of Q4 2016, South Korea had the fastest average internet connection in the world at 26.1 Mbit/s according to the report State of the Internet published by Akamai Technologies. South Korea's speed is almost four times faster than the world average of 7.0 Mbit/s. It is important to note that 100 Mbit/s services are the average standard in urban South Korean homes and the country is rapidly rolling out 1Gbit/s connections or 1,000 Mbit/s, at $20 per month, which is roughly 142 times as fast as the world average and 79 times as fast as the average speed in the United States.

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