The article: Video, interactivity could nab Web users by 2010

Reveals these three fun facts:

- YouTube generates “27 petabytes (27 million gigabytes) of data per month.” (or about 1 petabyte per day)

- “Cable and phone companies provide broadband to 60.2 million homes, accounting for about 94% of the market.” There are 32.6 million customers using cable, implying 27.6 million using DSL.

- It will cost $55 billion to upgrade the wiring to all these households.

That will give us what they already have in South Korea:

South Korea leads the way – “Ever since moving here to teach English two years ago, Renck has had a high-speed Internet connection of 8 megabits per second–only about average for a South Korean apartment, but nearly eight times the typical broadband speed in U.S. households. He watches TV shows over this connection, creates multimedia projects for his class, and regularly updates a Weblog… For Americans, almost none of whom have access to speeds that Renck and many South Koreans take for granted, this difference is jarring. The United States considers itself the center of technological innovation, yet South Korea has gone considerably further in making a mainstream reality out of the futuristic promises of bygone dot-com days.”

According to Government Policy Leads Korea to Top Position in High-Speed Access, it does cost billions of dollars – “The advent of broadband, though, was not cheap. The government estimates the cost of building the infrastructure and marketing it at $30 billion from 1995 to 2005. Total investment so far [2001, for 23 million subscribers], said an official at the Information Ministry, has been approximately $10 billion.”