Korea's high-speed Internet market has hit a saturation mark with more than 14 million of the nation's 15.5 million households hooked up to the broadband.

In this climate, broadband companies have struggled to find a way to remain competitive in the overstuffed markets composed of many players.

But market leader KT, which has a Megapass brand for broadband services, discovered a solution to the quagmire _ upgrading the speed of its service even faster than end users can dream of.

This is the philosophy behind KT's fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) that promises 100 megabits per second (Mbps), about 50 times faster than the current norm of 2Mbps.

With the throughput, people can download two-high high-definition movies online in about a minute, as opposed to today's average of one hour.

``We plan to spend more than 400 billion won this year alone to improve our Internet pipelines and to install novel networks,'' a KT spokesman said.

``By 2010, we plan to replace previous networks with FTTH across the country. We are determined to push the envelope in the Internet business as we did in the past,'' he said.

Indeed, KT has been at the forefront in introducing high-speed Internet to Korea over the past few years, thus helping the country become a global leader in the segment.

KT was a latecomer to the Internet service market as the company had to see its cross-city rival Hanaro Telecom make history by commercializing the ADSL (asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), the first bona fide Web connection services, in April 1999.

KT made inroads to the ADSL market two months later but the firm took the driver's seat in 2002 by embarking on 13 Mbps very-fast digital subscriber line (VDSL) for the first time in the world.

KT upgraded the maximum speed to 50 Mbps in 2004 before launching the ultra-fast FTTH, the prestigious offerings serviced under the banner of Megapass.

In addition, KT has recently adopted various programs to increase satisfaction of 64 million-plus Megapass subscribers. For example, females may ask for female engineers to fix Internet connection problems.

Engineers will visit at any time when requested, even late on weekends.