2 Chinese ISPs Serve 20% of World Broadband Users 110
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.'"
Re:20%? (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet it's >75% of the infected/pwned machines if the logs from my servers are any indication......
Re:And they only get 20% of the internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
On average, Internet access is ~30% cheaper in China than in the US, which is actually fucking expensive for China if you consider the average salary in China vs. average Salary in the US.
Re:China has 20% of the world's population! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's news because unlike other countries, which just talk about it, China sets a goal of giving every user Broadband access, then DOES IT.
Re:And they only get 20% of the internet? (Score:2, Interesting)
What constitutes broadband in China?
Its commonly claimed (usually with little in the way of statistics) that what qualifies as broadband in the USA would not be considered broadband in other countries.
(Usually the comparison countries are European, where there is a strong state funded telecom authority.)
Re:And they only get 20% of the internet? (Score:0, Interesting)
People living in USA only get something like 1% of the internet, because Americans are rarely able to read any language other then English (and perhaps Spanish in some parts of USA).
Worse, people living in USA rarely visit English language sites from other parts of the world. E.g. There are excellent English language news sites from most parts of the world, giving the perspective of the local people and reporting about important stuff that get censored by the news media in USA (like the largest oil spill in the world, caused by American oil companies (protected by the US government/military and therefor very hard to do something about for the rest of the world), that has been going on since the 1960's in Nigeria, the reason people outside USA have very hard to feel sympathetical about any US trouble caused by the BP spill). But Americans stick with their own lousy news sites, giving them the same very skewed point of view as they are accustomed to. They don't even visit BBC News, despite being from a near identical culture and being the source of news that is in common for "everybody else" in the world (except for parts of the world where the BBC News site and radio broadcasts is actually blocked by the government).
And no, Google translate (and other automated translation services) only make things worse. The only language pair Google translate reasonably correct is French to English. If you already have som knowledge of Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Spanish, it may help you read those languages (but even for those languges it often mistranslates sentences into meaning something completely different in a fashion that makes it very hard to spot bad translations). For all other languages it is worse than nothing at all. E.g. it doesn't understand Swedish negations very well (very dependent on interpunctation in writing(*)) and translate most sentences to the opposite of what they originally meant.
(*) Google Translate has real trouble with languges that heavily depend on interpunctation in writing, like Swedish that use it to communicate tonality, stress and phonemes otherwise not writeable with the Latin alphabet.
Re:Monopolies Are Bigger Than Cartels (Score:3, Interesting)
You are mistaken. Russia's may be a mafia economy, China's definitely not. It's more like Japan's state capitalism.
You are also mistaken to assume that China ONLY has 2 ISPs - absolutely wrong. China probably has more ISPs than US or any other country. The original article merely states that two big ISPs from China have highest subscriber counts - not market share percentages!! Big distinction.
In fact, China's ISP industry, for quite a while anyway, suffers from hyper cut-throat competition and low capital concentration. Too many ISPs with too little investment capital.
You don't seem to know much about Chinese ISP industry (nor about Japan's economy or America's presumably), but very bold in making sweeping statements. Suggest you make statement on what a healthy Internet would to be (which you may qualify) but not what Chinese are or are not (which you certainly are not qualified).
Re:That is wildly inaccurate (Score:4, Interesting)
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices.
That only applies to completely free markets (and sometimes doesn't even work there). It only applies there because with no competition, the companies can and will charge as much as people are willing to spend ("Oh? We are the only company that sells fuel in this area? Fuel that people desperately need. We can charge whatever the fuck we want!") and with competition they are forced to lower their profit margins.
A regulatory body can look at the cost of materials, etc. and say "You really would be able to offer the service for X... You arent allowed to charge more than X+Y at most. If you are too incompetent to offer the service for that price, we will find someone more competent.". Of course, you can call that a form of competition (and yes, competition can and needs to exist even in completely socialistic systems) and you would be correct... But I doubt it is the kind of competition you had in mind there.
But how do you come up with X and Y? With sufficient lobbying/bribing, Y can be increased, since it's just arbitrary profit margin, essentially a cartel imposed by the government. Also in most businesses, X changes all the time, sometimes even rapidly. The regulatory body would need to be constantly re-calculating proper value of X, or there will be trouble one way or the other. And the people doing the re-calculating have no personal interest in getting the real value for X (unless you enter corruption, in which case they actually have interest in getting false value of X). And sometimes there will be somebody higher up that just comes in and says something like "I just heard that over there X+Y is this much, so it must be lower here because we are better than them, so make sure you calculate it so that it is", with no regard to reality.
Also, even though you'd imagine that businesses would still want to optimize to maximize profits, that's far less motivation than optimizing in order to not be driven out of business by more innovative competitor. Also, if any optimization goes to maximize profits, then the business owners benefit, unlike when optimization goes to lower the price (to gain market share from competitor).
In short, that doesn't work terribly well. Only thing that can determine correct value of X and optimal value of Y is the market itself. Your kind of regulation just doesn't work, and the longer the regulation continues, the farther it will drift from the optimum, and the more corruption will sneak into the system.
Only places where free market really doesn't work is markets where the goal is to minimize the business. For example health care, military, security: there the goal should be to minimize the need for that service, while business interest is to maximize need for their service. And another place for heavy regulation is business where there can be no competition for practical reasons, ie. "natural monopolies". But even in those cases, regulation doesn't work well, just better than free market would.
Re:Developing vs. Developed (Score:2, Interesting)
China's growth has only started when and to the extent to it opened it's economy to capitalism
Not quite - China has not "opened to Capitalism", they have merely allowed a free(-r) market to develop under Communism. Whether you believe it or not, China's economy is still tightly controlled by the central government - which is precisely why they haven't succumbed to the woes that hit Russia, where a few got obscenely rich and most of the rest fell on hard times - because Yeltsin, in his drunken stupor, just let go. Happily for the Chinese, their government have chosen a far more restrained and disciplined route, and their success is obvious.
Btw, sure you can accomplish a specific goal in the short term if you turn a nation of 100 million into 100 million slave laborers dedicated to that goal, and sacrifice a few million lives in the process, but that strategy ain't gonna work for long. Can't believe there are still Stalin apologists around today.
Let's not start this stupid mudslinging again; you know perfectly well that it has no truth in it. An just for your information: There is still a significant number of people in former USSR that see Stalin and Lenin as great heroes, and who feel that what they did was necessary for the greater good. I can't say that I agree, but I can understand it - Russia before Communism was a backwater with huge inequalities; Stalin et al introduced universal education and social security, at in least in the same sense that he persecuted opponents and sent them to Siberia.
And so on. You know, I don't have a problem with people criticising China and/or Russia - there are many real and serious problems, and there are many on different levels of government that are trying to block progress; but I really can't abide this sort of uninformed black-painting. Not only is it unfair and unreasonable on so many levels, but it also puts your own smug idiocy on display, and it quite frankly makes me cringe.
Here's a couple of definitions: Ignorant - that's when you don't know. Stupid - that's when you go out of your way to avoid learning.
Re:And they only get 20% of the internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why another nail in the coffin?
If their pay catches up then they lose the competetive advantage and investment in the US becomes more viable again, surely?
Re:Monopolies Are Bigger Than Cartels (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not mistaken. China's economy is mafia. The government is the mafia. It enforces its policies by brutal force, it is highly corrupt, the people have no rights protected, only protected by fear of a counterrevolution or a discouraged work slowdown. The government exploits labor and nature to ruination, enforced by fear of violence. Crime is OK for cronies, competition is prohibited outside of what benefits the rulers. That's a mafia economy. In Russia, the mafia is part of the economy, but the government itself is a mafia mostly only in the energy industry.
I didn't say China has only two ISPs, you did. Anonymous strawman Coward, I know more about China and its economy than you care to admit, because you're just another Chinese apologist. I wouldn't be surprised if you work for China's propaganda ministry.