2 Chinese ISPs Serve 20% of World Broadband Users

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world and both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Every other ISP trails dramatically. Japan's NTT comes in third with 17 million subscribers, and all US providers are smaller still. 'The gap between the top two operators and the world's remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly,' said TeleGeography Research Director Tania Harvey. 'Aside from the two Chinese companies, all of the top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.'"

ALIRIGHT CHINA POWER !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cat Power is better for all

Re:Choice

[koxkoxkox]

Exactly, at least in the Beijing area where I live. They precisely delimited which area each company serve, and redirect you to the other one if you call them but are not in their area.

Re:What does "serve" mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think these are individual subscribers and broadband subscribers. The article quotes 55 M for China Telecom, which is about right.

By the way, a lot of earlier comments show staggering degree of ignorance - it's really sad. With the exception of content censorship issues, Chinese telecom, mobile and Internet businesses are amazingly vibrant and advanced, more advanced in some areas than US. While large telecom operators used to be monopolistic and bureaucratic, they have been rapidly deregulated and made competitive in the last 30 years or so. As a result, they have grown exponentially, not just customer head counts, but also in services they offer, revenue and profits. China Mobile, for example, has probably the highest market value of all mobile operators. (It's "capital market value in $", dear capitalist.) So if people still think of them as Soviet style planned economy and have "pity" on their consumers, your "sympathy" is misplaced!

Of course details are more complicated, and censorship is a big issue, not to take light of it, but in a whole, I think it's healthy for Americans to realize that Chinese economy of today is extremely open and competitive today for a large part of industries. In fact, it's common joke today to say that Republicans will be drooling if they could get China's level of low regulation.

Re:Choice

[euyis]

Actually there're choices - some time earlier the huge China telecommunications company broke up and became two separate corporations, with Netcom (later merged with Unicom as per orders from the government in order to "create more competition" and "optimize the structure") serving north China and Telecom serving south. They expanded into the rival's territories rapidly and actually competed with each other at the beginning, but the two biggest ISPs soon realized that competition was not a good idea for them and signed a "truce" restricting themselves to current distribution, for Telecom no further north and Netcom no further south.

And the "choices" are nothing more than different flavours of the same shit - you get the same shitty Internet (eh, Intranet with some access to outside) with different ISP advertisements (deep packet inspection & inserting HTML codes) fucking up your pages and trojan horse PPPoE dialers.

Re:Developing vs. Developed

[Animats]

One piece of data for those thinking China is just about to take over: China GDP per capita $6,500 (slightly better than Namibia, slightly worse than El Salvador). by comparison USA: $46,000. As far as living standards go, China has a looong way to go and some major transformations on the way.

It's sometimes useful to think of China as two countries; a somewhat-developed country of about 400 million, mostly in the coastal provinces, plus another 900 million rural peasants. There's a formal registration system ("hukou") [washington.edu] to enforce this division, tying peasants to their home area. It's not as rigid as it once was, but it's still in effect. Most of the economic gains are being realized by urban workers.

Re:Choice

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lived in Beijing (4 different locations), Dongguan and Shenzhen.

In most cases you can choose from both Unicom(CNC) and Telecom. Just the older buildings typically cannot because, indeed, in the past, the market was divided. The real scam though is, that the many local/community/building ISP there are not allowed to peer with International ISP's. This means your International traffic will always go through Unicom(CNC), Telecom or, sometimes, China Mobile.