Top Consumer ISPs in South Korea

With a densely populated urban area around its capital city, Seoul, South Korea has developed into a flourishing broadband community where DSL completes with cable modem access. Satellite and wireless connectivity lags because copper and coaxial connections are so readily available.

by Alex Goldman Associate Editor ISP-Planet [December 19, 2002]

In South Korea, dialup accounts continue to decrease as users trade up for cable modem and DSL access. Satellite services show a dramatic decrease, but this segment of the broadband market is under the control of a single incumbent carrier, Korea Telecom. As a result, it's impossible to distinguish between a monopoly disincentive hindering satellite uptake and the technological disadvantages of satellite Internet access, which is subject to latency.

Notes:

1) Korea Telecom was the sole satellite Internet provider in South Korea and reported 6,087 subscribers.

2) We do not count free and shell accounts, which number 4,369,047 at Boranet (DACOM), 5,504,614 at the all-free university provider Edunet, 424,846 at Kolnet (Hitel), 2,132,437 at Netsgo (SK Telecom), and 1,850,201at Nowcom.

3) Tiers are defined by KoreaNIC by number of /24s of IP addresses as follows:

Tier 1: more than 16,384
Tier 2: more than 2,048
Tier 3: more than 256
Tier 4: more than 32
Tier 5: more than 4
Tier 6: more than 1
Tier 7: 1

An ISP's tier determines the annual fees it owes KoreaNIC.

4) KoreaNIC says there are 85 facilities-based ISPs in South Korea.

Top Webhosts in South Korea
For reasons not explained by the data shown here, the total number of leased line accounts and the total number of Webhosting accounts both declined in South Korea over the past six months. This could mean that there are fewer sites that need to be hosted or that sites hosted in South Korea three months ago have found hosts in other countries. Either way, there has been a downturn in Webhosting activity.

Networking Accounts in South Korea
The number of networking accounts increased as cable and DSL users signed up for them.

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