Korea

Description

Ninety percent of the country has blazingly fast, 3-megabits-per-second broadband at home, and similarly high-speed wireless connections on the road. The telecom market is fiercely competitive, and broadband service costs the consumer less than $20 a month. There are 20,000 PC baangs, or Internet cafes, where you can rent a superfast machine for $1 an hour. Online gaming has become a way of life, with nearly 3,000 South Korean videogame companies boasting combined revenues of up to $4 billion. As a result, South Korea has become the world's best laboratory for broadband services - and a place to look to for answers on how the Internet business may evolve. Smart bet on broadband

Fast-forward 11 years: Korea is now the most connected and Net-addicted country on Earth. There are a few American companies who have benefited from the South Korean broadband boom: Blizzard, for example, makes a popular online game called Starcraft which is so widely played in South Korea that two TV channels broadcast Starcraft matches between professional players.

Enablers

Korean Government: In 1995, the South Korean government made what must rank as one of the most shrewd and far-sighted investments in business history. It spent big on a nationwide high-capacity broadband network that any telecom operator could offer service on, and offered subsidies so that 45 million Koreans could buy cheap PC's. Cost: a mere $1.5 billion. Additionally the South Korean government invests huge amounts of money in nanotechnology. Finally the competition with the really advanced neighbor country of Japan will drive korea to invest even more amounts of money in technology and thus to shorten the coming age of Ubiquitous computing