I caught part of a BBC report where they said that South Koreans enjoyed the fastest internet service of any country in the world. So how is it that those guys who not only get things like a neighbor to the north run by a guy who likes giant rubber monster movies, Kia pets, landmine gardens, and kim chee, have the ability to get their pr0n delivered to them faster than anyone else in the planet? Did they wire the entire country with fiber optics when we weren’t looking or something? And when will the rest of us be getting proper pr0n delivery?
Porn? I thought it was all fuelled by their love of Starcraft multiplayer 
Actually, yes.
It helps that the entire country is smaller than many US states, and has a lot of people. More subscribers per square kilometre, and this less cable to be laid for each subscriber. Result? More profit. I’m not sure I’d want to try the same strategy in Nunavut, though.
Another thought… you can get the same effect in high-density areas in North America. I believe the massive CityPlace condo development in Toronto is all wired with 100-megabit-per-second fibre to each apartment. If there were enough of these high-density areas, and not a lot of rural areas, the high-density areas could certainly carry the cost of fibre-cabling the rural areas.
Well, it’s not a big country geographically; it has a robust industry dedicated in no small part to electronics; about two-thirds of the almost-entirely literate population use the internet (according to the CIA Factbook) and it’s been technically at war since 1950, encouraging the development of an advanced and distributed communications network. If anybody’d be embracing the 'net, I can’t think of a more likely candidate (Japan, maybe). The only things that might slow them down, a little, is geographical and cultural isolation, the first preventing them from running land lines and microwave networks to the rest of Asia through North Korea (they do okay with underwater cables and satellites, though) and the second being that few nearby nations (except for North Korea) share a common language.
The big buzz last year was that the industry wants to get the local internet service up to 1GB/second
of note, more than 3 million copies of Starcraft were sold in Korea alone, while selling a million copy of any game in the US would be of no small accomplishment even today. i’m guessing a large push for higher net speed comes from games.