South Korea leads in the number of DSL connections per head worldwide. ADSL is standard, but VDSL has started growing quickly. ADSL commonly offers speeds of 2 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s, with VDSL accordingly faster. The large proportion of South Korea's population living in apartment blocks helps the spread of DSL, as does a high penetration of consumer electronics in general. Many apartment buildings in built-up metropolitan areas, such as Seoul and Incheon, have speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. VDSL is commonly found in newer apartments while ADSL is normally found in landed properties where the telephone exchange is far away.
The Internet has a higher status for many Koreans than it does in the West, and the government actively supports this. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation South Korea's internet is the most developed in the world. Particularly Seoul, the nation's capital, has been called "the bandwidth capital of the world" In January 2006, it became the first country to achieve over 50% broadband penetration per capita. By 2005, it was the first country to complete the conversion from dial-up to broadband. It also has the cheapest, fastest broadband in the world. Now there are experiments with speeds of 1 Gigabit per second. Additionally, in 2005 96.8% of South Korean mobile phones had Internet access.