fast Internet connection in Seoul

I'm an internet geek and have always been fascinated with the massive scale deployment of fibre optics in Seoul to enable super-fast broadband. I'm sat here at my desk on a 60+mbit/s line with 10+mbit/s outbound. Enough to run a mid-size UK office building on. I think it is uncontended meaning that I get the full speed 24/7/365. I tried a couple of online speed-tests but they were unable to provide accurate readings as it blew the dial.

To give you an idea, a 700MB movie from a P2P site comes down in 15 to 19 minutes, a 7GB hi-def file comes down in under 3 hours. I should explain that while I am here, I am doing an independent report for the online video industry before you send my details to the studio's lawyers ;-) My immediate conclusion is that the studios are just a the pointy end of the wedge of film piracy and they probably need a secure micro-billing solution pretty quickly, yes ok, obvious plug, but I happen to think it's important :-)

Interestingly, when I first arrived my MacBook needed to be registered in order to get full internet access, I had a sporadic connection and some sites were blocked and whilst it was perfectly usable I could not access some vital services such as my online banking in the UK. Abunim called the ISP at around 8pm in the evening and someone arrived at the apartment at 1pm the next day to connect me, amazing, especially coming from the UK where customer service and satisfaction is woeful at best. The point is however that cheap labour does not necessarily need to be unskilled or manual, technology service engineers fall into this category in South Korea and probably underpin a chunk of the technology industry, which is HUGE!

Kamsahamnida, for reading.