SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea already claims the world’s fastest Internet connections – the fastest globally by far – but that is hardly good enough for the government here.

By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.

A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is under way, with 5,000 households in five South Korean cities wired. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.

‘South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,