Broadband creates e-cafe culture

By PETER GRIFFIN

The buzz from an inner-city Seoul cyber cafe, or "PC Bang" as they're known as in Korea, captures my attention.

Venturing in, I see banks of hundreds of PCs, most occupied by Koreans deeply engrossed in a fast-paced shoot-'em-up.

Some users tap out an email or surf the web. But online gaming - connecting to computer servers to join other players in a massive cyber free-for-all - is the main activity.

Internet cafes have popped up all over Korea as a result of the broadband explosion. At the end of last year there were 21,400, and franchises such as Geto have proliferated.

The basic internet access prices are cheap - on average about 80USc ($1.60) an hour for straight web surfing. Operators make money by supplying customised content, online entertainment and healthy quantities of tea.

It must be the social allure of the cyber-cafes that draws young Koreans, for there's a good chance they have lightning-fast internet access at home anyway.

About 7.8 million Korean households had broadband internet at the end of last year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Most Koreans love using the web. For simple surfing, conventional Western webpages such as www.yahoo.com are constantly visited, as are the scores of local sites catering for everything from teen chat rooms to "K-pop" fans.

Spend any length of time in Korea and names such as Mashimaro and Zolamon - cult cyber characters with huge followings - may catch your attention.

Instant Messaging, a killer application in its own right, is big in Korea too.

MSN Messenger is a favourite, as are Daum Messenger and BuddyBuddy.

But it's not all fun and games on the internet.

More than half of the trades on the Kosdaq, Korea's stock exchange, are now traded over the web. And about 12 million people use internet banking services.

Internet shopping is also popular.

About 70 per cent of families with an income of more than 2.5 million won ($4100) a month use the internet regularly.

Spikes on the usage graphs show high usage by students, office workers and the highly skilled.

Dial-up internet, the frustratingly slow method of connecting to the web for most New Zealanders, is just about dead in Korea. Less than 5 per cent of web surfers use dial-up modems to access the web.

Nearly half of internet users access the web through DSL (digital subscriber line) services - similar to what Telecom offers with its Jetstart and Jetstream services.

The high access speeds mean web pages load quickly. Koreans spend an average of just 28 seconds on each page before moving on.

The average monthly broadband bill for Koreans equates to less than US$30 for-all-you-can-eat access.

The close proximity of apartment buildings and telecoms infrastructure means that in the main towns few miss out on broadband by "being too far from the telephone exchange", an oft-repeated Telecom New Zealand excuse.

As city dwellers make technology an even bigger part of their life, the Government's digital divide policies have targeted housewives and the disabled, as well as people living in Korea's many rural farming and fishing towns.

The local post office has become a broadband hotspot in small rural villages.

E-learning is also big. Eleven cyber-universities have sprung up in the past few years. About 4 million Koreans have been put through Government-sponsored internet courses.

Being one of the most switched-on nations in the world, however, does have drawbacks.

Spam, that collection of electronic junkmail clogging up most of our e-mail accounts, is reaching epidemic proportions in Korea.

It has got to the stage where the Korean Government has made it mandatory for unsolicited commercial mail to have "advertisement" added to its subject line.

Korea is also the fourth most virus-inflicted nation. And it's not just naive home users without anti-virus software installed who are getting hit.

When the nasty Nimda virus struck last September, 20,000 Korean web servers came under attack.

Geto

Yahoo

MSN Messenger

BuddyBuddy