Amended from The Korea Times:

Today, South Korea is indisputably an Internet powerhouse thanks to the nation’s state-of-the-art infrastructure and tech-aware citizens.

More than 30 million of the nation’s 48 million population carry wireless Internet-capable cell phones and the government plans to deploy a cheaper form of wireless broadband, named WiBro, next year.

Then two big ``stars’’ triggered uproars from broadband fans across the nation: one was footage of film star Oh Hyun-kyung having sex with her manager and the other was online game Starcraft.

The problem was that conventional dial-up modem-based access was too late to seamlessly stream the 1998 Miss Korea beauty pageant winner’s video and people started paying attention to the speed of the connection.

ADSL was the answer with its average speed of 2.5 Mbps that can send data equivalent to 50 pages of newspapers per second, and the video that maintained its popularity into 2000 prompted many to sign up for the new Internet.

``Oh’s case confirmed a tech axiom that porn drives the use of new technologies including video rentals, CD-ROMs, chatting and online shopping,’’ said Stan Jung, analyst from Woori Securities.

The other ``star’’ Starcraft also made a notable impact on the progress of the Korean broadband industry.

When the real-time strategic game tapped into the nation in 1998 via local distributor Hanbitsoft, it was far from being a blockbuster with just 120,000 people buying the game.

With the advent of fixed-rate broadband a year later, however, the bandwidth-devouring online game fully took off with 1999 annual sales topping 1 million sets.

During the next four years through 2004, Hanbitsoft sold 2.5 million sets more, a stellar achievement considering most Koreans usually do not pay money in buying software or game programs. Instead, they usually copy them.

``Starcraft and the Internet is an example of a win-win formula. They helped each other become established in the domestic market. Starcraft has 15 million fans here and is still one of the main forces propelling Internet use,’’ Hanbitsoft spokesperson Kang Yu-ni said.

With such a favorable atmosphere, Hanaro signed up 134,000 subscribers in 1999 and expanded its customer base to 1.1 million the next year.

As the ADSL technology once in question went mainstream, KT also jumped onto its bandwagon in May 2000 and acquired up to 1.7 million clients that year alone.

The reasoning that Oh’s video footage and Starcraft have been drivers of Internet use was accepted by Hanaro Telecom.

``Certainly, they were two factors that galvanized broadband fever. They contributed much to the early take-off of ADSL Internet although they are not all the driving forces,’’ Hanaro vice president Doo Won-soo said.