The land of technological miracles, K-pop deities, and ramen that’ll vaporize your taste buds, has finally decided, hey, maybe we should let space internet happen. And not just for kicks. No, this time it’s official.

The Ministry of Science and ICT (yes, it sounds like a Harry Potter department but with fewer wands and more red tape) has granted licenses for both Eutelsat OneWeb and SpaceX Starlink. Yes, Starlink too. Elon Musk’s shiny internet constellation is now allowed to beam down into Korea’s previously locked-down spectrum sandbox.

Cue the ceremonial ribbon-cutting, fireworks, and a small bureaucrat fainting from the sheer weight of precedent.

But let’s pause and ask: why did it take so long? This is a country that builds bendable phones and sends idols to stardom overnight. Yet they’ve been slower than a Windows 95 startup when it comes to letting satellites provide broadband.

Turns out, the issue was regulatory. Korea’s spectrum laws had more locks than a doomsday vault. But someone finally found the key, or just got tired of all the meetings, and rewrote the Radio Waves Act in March 2025. Now, instead of treating foreign satellites like intergalactic spies, they’re letting them beam in like long-lost cousins at Chuseok.

Enter Eutelsat OneWeb, rolling in with its best friend Intellian Technologies. Intellian, a Korean company, is now the main provider of ground terminals. Because nothing says “national security” like, “Don’t worry, it’s locally made.”

And then there’s Starlink, Musk’s space spaghetti net. Starlink Korea LLC is now a thing. They’ve promised direct-to-cell services and other sci-fi features, because what could go wrong with Elon Musk directly handling your text messages from orbit?

All this action will obviously be disrupting Korea’s Big Three telcos, SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus, who’ve long ruled the internet with the same cheerful benevolence as medieval kings taxed peasants. LEO networks are coming in hot, offering speeds and latencies that might make 5G blush in shame.

And what are the stakes? A projected $3.5 billion satellite comms market by 2033. That’s billion with a “B,” in a country that knows how to squeeze gold from digital turnips. This is about to leapfrog over terrestrial networks like a caffeinated kangaroo.

South Korea just went from “foreign satellites? Over my dead legislation” to “please, beam your megabits into our hearts and modems.” It’s progress. The kind that smells like profit and panic, panic from traditional telcos, profit for antenna manufacturers, and the sweet smell of signal for people stuck somewhere rural with nothing but spotty 4G and existential dread.

Beam us up, Korea. Took you long enough.