S. Korean Brings Internet to North

SEOUL — Its people lack food. Prices are soaring. Electricity is scarce, and the rest of the world is alarmed by its murky nuclear ambitions.

What North Korea needs in these difficult, troubling times, says Kim Beom Hoon, is simple: the Internet.

Kim, a successful South Korean businessman, is on a quest to bring cyberspace to the isolated North, a country where the basic infrastructure is barely functioning, let alone able to support construction of an information superhighway.

But against all probability, and despite run-ins with South Korean authorities suspicious of his activities, Kim has managed to push ahead with what might seem an impossible dream.

Nine months ago, he opened North Korea's first Internet cafe, in downtown Pyongyang, complete with high-speed connections and attendants serving free drinks.

Forget, for now, that the facility is frequented only by foreigners, the diplomats and journalists and aid workers who were starved for a place where they could send e-mail back home and hear news from the outside world.

And forget that the cost of logging on, at $10 an hour, is a princely sum to most North Koreans, who earn less than $50 a month and can hardly afford to eat.

"Beginning is half done," says Kim of his new venture, although he acknowledges that it has yet to make a cent.

Still, he harbors visions of grandeur, of an explosion in Internet access that will one day revitalize North Korea's basket-case economy and even, Kim says earnestly, pave the way for eventual reunification between the two Koreas.

If there is any logic to bringing the world of super connectivity to so hermetic and poor a place as communist North Korea, it makes sense that the South would be the country to do it.

Not just because of its proximity -- across a heavily armed border -- but because South Korea is one of the most wired nations on Earth, where the Internet reaches 70% of the populace.

Around Seoul, Internet cafes, known as "PC bangs," are as ubiquitous as Starbucks in the U.S., low-cost hangouts where young people gather to play networked video games or just surf the Web.

Kim's PC bang in central Pyongyang made its debut in May, on the ground floor of a nondescript three-story building owned by his North Korean partner, Jangsaeng Trading Co. The facility boasts several state-of-the-art computers.

It wasn't the primary aim of Kim's firm, Hoonnet.com, to set up an Internet cafe in the North Korean capital.