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And they have the fastest broadband in the East....
MSNBC carried an interesting report on the popularity of online gambling in South Korea, where government has invested massively in building one of the hottest broadband infrastructures in the world, and certainly in the East.
Wires can transfer data at up to 50 megabits a second, whereas some of the fastest speeds offered by companies such as Yahoo! are around 6 megabits per second. Coupled with high broadband uptake, this facilitates gaming in homes across the country and 17 million of the country's 48 million population make extensive use of the highspeed service.
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Online gaming - as opposed to online gambling - is to South Korea what reality TV is to the United States: Huge. Really huge, MSNBC reports.
Close to 70 percent of South Korean households have broadband. And the fat pipes mean that its easier for these households to access media-rich content like games and video-on-demand, says Allison Luong, principal and managing director of San Franciscos Pearl Research.
As such, young people in the technology-obsessed culture have grown up online but not in the same way that the MySpacers have here in the United States. In South Korea, the home PC is as ubiquitous as a refrigerator.
South Korea also has a consumer culture that rivals the United States and Japan. And keeping up with new trends and technology is considered important to social status.
If you want to move up, you have to have access to the Internet and a PC, says Luong. And that means to access online games.
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