Much of China still has rubbish net connections, stats show China may have the full weight of the government behind its push towards improving fixed line broadband penetration in the country, but it’s still lagging far behind the UK, according to the latest stats from local content delivery firm ChinaCache. The report, handily translated by TechInAsia, show the average connection …
I think if the british govt were trying to network a country the size and terrain of china theyd be struggling too!
... and if you look at the land mass / fibre ration in canada thats probly not good on paper either
and OZ really is crap ...
However I just declared this office an independant country - and we have excellent connectivity throughout!
As a Chinese who worked with all 3 biggest ISP of China for more than 3 years. I have to say this article will mislead its readers. The low Internet connection is true, but the reason is definitely not lacks of infrastructure. They can provided much higher speed with almost no increase of cost, the reason it did not happen is because the lacks of competition: If you can sell 2Mb/s for the same prize as 30Mb/s, why give them 30 Mb/s?
Well, it may be a concern, as I know censorship is the reason China delay its IPv6 upgrades process. But I don't think this will be the main reason, because the speed of Internet is mostly measured between ISP router and end users, so they can keep a slow international port with fast speed inside.
Your assessment is surprisingly astute, much like China's blocking of western websites to economically protect the chinese clones (weibo, renren et al.).
There are big economic reasons - many people here don't expect or demand a higher bitrate service and will pay for the low speeds. Current iPhones (not fixed broadband I know) can't get real 3G on China Mobile, so they can sell them 3G priced packages for 2G / 2.5G service.
Living in China, I can attest that the internet service does suck. I live in Guangzhou in Guangdong province which, considering it's proximity to Hong Kong, i would expect to have faster than China average speeds.
The reasoning of the article, that it's the interuptions of the Great-Firewall that are causing it to be slow is very very true. I pay for an "8 Mbps" service, which does seem to fly along when visiting sites inside China and therefore inside the firewall. However, speeds drop to about ~2Mbps to sites outside. It's not just the time-outs and disruptions, it seems to be actually throttling the connection.
However, I believe the biggest point of contention isn't the advertised down speed. It's the up-speed. Connections in the UK have been not just racing up in download speeds, but uploads have been as well. Admittedly not in parity with downloads, but still pretty hefty.
At last check, my Chinese connection had 0.15Mbps upload. You wouldn't believe how seriously that bottle neck affects my connection. Particularly if the misses is streaming videos from Chinese streaming software such as PPS or PPTV.
And yes, there's the other thing. The COMPLETE lack of respect of copyright on China's "internal intranet"
To be honest, not even UK or any other country can provide the same speed for international connection as local connection, it's just simply not affordable in theory. And if you have a 8Mbps ADSL connection, you should have 1 Mbps upload speed. Again, it's measured for local connection only.
Here in Beijing they've just upgraded my connection to a fibre link (supposedly 20Mbs), and it certainly is faster than before. However, I've lived in other cities in China, and the service there certainly wasn't as good.
On the plus side, there isn't (doesn't appear to be anyway) any bandwidth limitations per month etc, so that's a big thing, especially as I download all my TV!
Also, remember that most of the people here still live in the countryside, and they're lucky if they have running water and toilets that aren't holes in the ground, let alone an internet connection.
may I suggest that a more appropriate country to compare with China (area : 9,640,821 km2, population 1 339 724 852 persons) in this regard would be India (area : 3,287,263 km2, population : 1 210 193 422 persons) rather than the UK (area : 243,610 km2, population : 63 162 000 persons) ?...
Henri
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