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To: MikeM54321 who wrote (7349)	7/16/2000 5:54:46 PM
From: MikeM54321	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 12823

Re: Asian Broadband Stats- Korean DSL and Cable Modem Thread- Some very surprising stats(at least for me). The absolute figures are what surprised me. Considering Korea is a nation of only 50 million people, it has quite a substantial number of broadband users. FWIW, I believe Cisco is fairly heavily entrenced in Korea. -Korea Telecom 491,349 DSL and CM subs -Hanaro Telecom 321,395 DSL subs -Korea Thrunet 393,111 CM subs Total 1,205,855 broadband subs today I do not know how accurate the figures are. I’m just reporting from the article below. -MikeM(From Florida) ************************** Korean High-Speed Internet Users Rise 40% in June** Seoul, July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Korea's high-speed Internet users surged 40 percent in the first three weeks of June as more people signed up for links provided by Korea Telecom Corp., Hanaro Telecom Inc. and rival companies. The Ministry of Information and Communication said Korea had 1.57 million high-speed Internet subscribers on June 21, an increase of 450,000 from the end of May. High-speed or broadband connections -- either through cable television or copper phone lines with special adaptors -- enable connections up to 100 times faster than is possible over a conventional modem and phone line. Downloading a music or video file, two common activities on the Internet, takes seconds using broadband. A similar operation is either impossible or can take hours using a conventional modem. The rapid takeoff in broadband is more evidence of Korea's interest in new technology. The nation is already home to Asia's second-largest Internet user population and the region's third- largest mobile phone market. Korea also has the second-highest number of entries, after the U.S., on the world's top 100 most- visited Internet websites. Some analysts believe Korea Telecom, the country's largest telecommunications company, may profit the quickest from the spreading popularity of high-speed services. ''We've consistently expected KT to have 50 percent to 60 percent of the total broadband market,'' said Candice Wha, a telecommunications analyst at Goldman Sachs Asia LLC, in Hong Kong. ''Your payback period for rolling out broadband is going to be much faster for KT than for anyone else because they have the existing infrastructure in place.'' Korea Telecom topped the list of all types of broadband connections, with 491,349 customers. KT rival Hanaro Telecom Inc., previously the leading asymmetric digital line subscriber service provider until Korea Telecom began to concentrate on ADSL, had a customer base of 428,527. Three-quarters are connected via ADSL connections, which use higher unused frequencies on standard copper phone lines to carry more data. ''KT is the lowest-risk way to play broadband but not the purest,'' said Goldman's Wha, who is recommending Hanaro Telecom as a ''high risk but high return investment'' because ''by any valuation measure it's extremely cheap.'' Hanaro's local Kosdaq over-the-counter index stock is down 61 percent this year, slightly worse than the 58 percent slide by its American depositary receipts since they began trading at the end of March. Korea Thrunet Co., the country's first high-speed Internet service provider, had 393,111 users on its cable modem service, which uses cable television lines and special modems to carry Internet connections. In June, ADSL customers overtook cable users for the first time as Korea Telecom, which previously backed another technology called integrated services digital network, began promoting the technology more heavily. The surge in subscriptions has also been helped by a reduction in the time new users must wait to be connected, down from as long as three months to about a week. That's because service providers have secured more equipment from suppliers such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Alcatel SA to connect customers. Korea Telecom shares fell 0.6 percent to 90,600 won, bringing their losses to 49 percent this year. Thrunet, which was the first Korean company to conduct its initial share sale in the U.S., is down 80 percent this year.