Robust government policy has helped build a high-speed nation, writes Jamie Smyth.

Ms Young Eun Won is sitting in a trendy internet café in the Coex shopping mall in Seoul sipping a Coke while casually texting her friends the latest web gossip. Like many 22-year-old women living in South Korea, she subscribes to the internet blogging portal Cyworld, a Korean online discussion and blogging site that boasts a phenomenal 10 million customers. For Ms Won, as with the majority of South Koreans, using the web is now as common as watching television - and, increasingly, much more fun.

Ms Won doesn't have to pay to use the broadband service in this particular café because it is one of several free services supplied by companies to advertise their brands in the Coex mall. The café is the inspiration of the South Korean cigarette maker KT&G and conveniently offers one of the few smoking rooms in the shopping centre. Its strategy is simple: KT&G wants to build its brand awareness by offering young people a service that has become a way of life for a generation of South Koreans under the age of 30.

In a country of about 48 million people, there are now almost 12 million broadband customers. This means broadband is connected in eight out of 10 South Korean homes.

"I have never used a dial-up modem," says Mr Kun-Young Ahn, director of the South Korean government's ICT Investment and Co-operation Division, who is in charge of publicising the state's broadband and information technology policy. "We have about 30 million internet users here and all of them are using broadband services."

The average broadband service available to the public in South Korea costs about $20 (€15.44) and crucially offers speeds of up to three megabytes per second, significantly faster than all the consumer broadband services available in Ireland.

Digital subscriber line and cable technologies deliver the vast amount of broadband services currently, although this week the government allocated the bandwidth for portable wireless broadband services known as WiBro in South Korea. This technology will use the 2.3 gigahertz band and 802.16 wireless standard to deliver download speeds of up to one megabyte per second to devices that are moving at speeds of up to 70 kilometres per hour.

Add in the launch of the world's first commercial third-generation mobile service and a well-developed network of Wi-Fi hotspots in major cities such as Seoul and Pusan, and South Korea's mantle as the global broadband leader is not under any serious threat.

The government has adopted a tough regulatory approach with the incumbent operator Korea Telecom forcing it to provide rivals, such as Hanaro Telecom, with access to its network at cost-effective prices. Korea Telecom now controls just 50.6 per cent of the broadband market, which is fiercely competitive and currently undergoing a shake-out.

"Our feeling was that, even though Korea Telecom is a private company, telecoms is a public service and it should open its network," says Mr Ahn, who acknowledges this ended up becoming a big fight between the State and the incumbent telecoms operator.

The Government also played an important role by introducing a national PC programme enabling people to borrow money cheaply to buy computers and offering free and cheap tuition to the public on how to use a computer and the internet, he says.

A 2002 study by Brunel University and the British Department of Trade and Industry showed financial aid from the State helped to kick-start the broadband roll-out. In 1995, the South Korean government provided £1 billion (€1.43 billion) of funding for a new high-capacity backbone network, which meant that telecoms firms did not have to use only the infrastructure of the incumbent operator. It followed up this initiative by offering loans at preferentially low interest rates to firms who built new infrastructure.

The very high population density in South Korea and the popularity of video gaming was also cited by the report as key enablers for the country's "broadband revolution".

Revenues in the domestic video game industry grew from $2.8 billion in 2002 to $3.28 million in 2003, mostly as a result of rapid growth in the online gaming sector (which uses broadband internet services to connect players living in different locations).

"By far the biggest driver in the growth of games industry in Korea is the spread of high-speed internet," Dr Jong-Sik Woo, president of the Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute, a state body that promotes the gaming industry in South Korea.

"Games players in the US and Japan are now networked and China has got high-speed infrastructure in Beijing and Shanghai. So I believe it is very important for Ireland to have the right infrastructure," says Mr Woo, who told the Minister for Enterprise, Mr Micheál Martin, on a trade mission in Seoul this week, that Ireland needed this type of high-speed infrastructure to become a hub for the gaming and digital media industry.

There are currently 2,500 video game companies in South Korea, many of which are now global leaders in the online gaming sector as a result of the strong take-up of the technology in their home market. The government has set a target of becoming one of the three top gaming nations by 2007 with a market worth $8.5 billion per year. It also wants to increase video game exports from $150 million in 2002 to $1 billion in 2007.

"It is very likely that Korea will rule the world market for online games in the future because of the fact that all the computers are networked," says Mr Yun Hong Kim, founder and chief executive of the Seoul-based game development firm SGsoft.

But the video games industry is just one of several digital media industries that have benefited from the rapid roll-out and adoption of broadband technologies.

On the outskirts of Seoul, a $1.5 billion local government initiative called the Digital Media City bears testament to South Korea's lofty ambitions in the sector. The project is a much larger version of the urban renewal and investment strategy devised for the Liberties in Dublin. Launched in 2002, the South Korean strategy is now well underway with several $100 million-plus projects under construction in the northwest of Seoul.

"When the project is complete in 2010, we expect 20,000 companies to be located at the site, creating 270,000 new jobs and $7 billion worth of production added to the economy," says Mr Chon-ho Kang, an official in charge of the project for the Seoul government. Tax breaks and low rents are two of the key incentives attracting interest from a range of foreign investors as well as indigenous companies in South Korea.

And despite a difficult economic environment at the moment, the budget for the Digital Media City has been ring-fenced despite the concerns of some politicians and the public.

Clearly, in South Korea it is not just the tobacco companies and telecoms firms that have woken up to the importance of digital technologies. Technology is now the key driver of the economy.