Coming Soon: The Superfast Internet.

Byline: B. J. Lee

The gurus at Google and other power portals talk about new services for finding video clips and movies and downloading them from the Internet. But that promise assumes that users will have an extremely fast connection. At current broadband speeds, big photo and video files take ages to download, and picture resolution is often too low to hold up on large monitors. But in South Korea and Japan, superfast broadband Internet services are beginning to give users breezy access to data-heavy services. Millions of people now have optical fibers running into their homes that can carry 100 megabits per second--more than 20 times faster than conventional broadband. With that so-called optical broadband, a two-hour commercial movie (about 4.7 gigabytes of data) can be downloaded in just six minutes, compared with three hours for regular broadband at 3.5 megabits per second.

The arrival of superfast broadband has gotten a great deal of attention in Asia because it has the potential to disrupt a range of industries. If people can quickly download movies, who needs a DVD player? Hollywood and network television may be threatened by IPTV over high-speed lines. "If broadband was the first revolution of the Internet, optical broadband is the second," says Kwon Ki Duck, a researcher at Samsung Economic Research Institute.

Optical-broadband Internet is possible because the Japanese and South Korean telecommunications industries invested heavily in optical-fiber lines. In South Korea, more than 40 percent of the population live in high-rise apartments that can be easily connected to optical lines. Internet providers are trying to persuade the three quarters of the population who already have broadband to upgrade to optical connections. Last year optical subscribers in Korea jumped by ...