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Comments: 110 + - Technology: 2 Chinese ISPs Serve 20% of World Broadband Users on Thursday July 29, @10:46PM
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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.'"
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ALIRIGHT CHINA POWER !! (Score:1, Informative)
Cat Power is better for all
And they only get 20% of the internet? (Score:5, Funny)
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Someone could convert both ISP prices and statistics to compare with our ISPs ?
Re: (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.
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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: (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?
Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
And I bet the two ISPs serve different regions, in which case citizens wouldn't even get to choose between A and B.
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Because of all the things Chinese citizens could possible complain about, which state-owned pipe to the great firewall to choose from is totally going to rank in the top 5?
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Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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And does that really matter? These people have more important things to do in life than to argue about little things over their internet connections.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices. Higher prices means more time spent on working, and/or less money for other activities in life.
In other words, unless you consider doing more work to get money to be able to afford internet connection more important than the internet connection itself, yes it does matter.
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.
Parent
The view from the other side... (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind that in already saturated markets, like Tania Harvey says, growth of the market becomes pretty slow. Almost everyone in Japan, for example, already uses internet on PC or their cellphones etc. The companies may get customers to switch between them, but finding new customers is much harder.
Not to mention the "quality" of internet, one gets in China, what with half of it being blocked out/censored anyways. Long way to go before they catch up with the rest of the world.
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Not to mention the "quality" of internet, one gets in China, what with half of it being blocked out/censored anyways.
If half the internet is blocked then that means their connection is effectively twice as fast!
Not just that (Score:2)
The Chinese ISPs don't give two shits about hackers. So there's all kinds of bad stuff floating around on them. Not only puts you at risk as a subscriber, but means you getting even more blocked. A company gets a bunch of hack attempts and mails the ISP saying "Hey, you've got a baddy on your network." Their reply is, and I'm not making this up "That's not our IP address," even though APNIC says it is. So then the company says "Fuck you," and shitlists the ISP.
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You are also theoretically missing out on the half of the internet that is porn (if the filters actually worked as well as claimed). And that means that for at least half the population, the internet experience is not "better".
Developing vs. Developed (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this really news?
At all levels, China's GDP continues to grow while western nations stagnate or creep forward. China is developing while the west has already developed it products and service offerings. Eventually, they will reach a saturation point like the west and slow down. But get ready to accept them as the 1# economic super power when that happens. Simply put, they have far more human resources to tap into. The only thing holding them back right now is local politics.
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Of course we have also seen how a planned economy can be a victim of its own success. Which way China will go is tough to say but betting on them fully industrializing seems safe. It is what happens after that point that isn't clear.
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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 sacr
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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 discipl
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Re:Developing vs. Developed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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Actually, I think the only thing holding them back at the moment is the time it takes to actually put the infrastructure in place. For example they are building two new power stations every week, which is a lot by any measure, but it will still take them a long time to get all the power stations they need for their population.
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Note the conspicuous lack of innovation from China. What do the vacuum tube, the transistor, and the integrated circuit have in common? They weren't invented in China. What do the Internet, email, and social networking have in common. They were all viewed as dangerous by the Chinese government.
Perhaps the most import thing we learned from Copernicus and Galileo is not that the Earth goes around th
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For the average rural Chinese citizen they exist as a serf in an agrarian feudal society, as they have been for the last hundreds (thousands?) of years. The difference is that instead of some noble lord, they have the corrupt local appointed bureaucrat.
In most of china, the central government has no real influence in how the regional governors use their share of government income, so the bureaucrats take advantage of the situation.
Pfff (Score:5, Funny)
I bet if they deregulate they could get that down to just one ISP.
Define broadband (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you define it as 256kbps(like the US did until 2 years ago), 1.5 mbps(at&t basic DSL), 10m(comcast), 25-50mbps(FIOS,uverse, next gen comcast)?
in the US there are plenty of users who cant yet get above 5 mbps.
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Broadband is faster than dialup.
Re:Define broadband (Score:5, Funny)
Broadband is faster than dialup.
You'll go far with definitions like that.
Parent
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Do you define it as 256kbps(like the US did until 2 years ago), 1.5 mbps(at&t basic DSL), 10m(comcast), 25-50mbps(FIOS,uverse, next gen comcast)?
in the US there are plenty of users who cant yet get above 5 mbps.
I barely get 5mbs on Comcast. But still better than DSL.
Well technically (Score:2)
Broadband is any service where the line is shared with other services. So any speed of cable or DSL qualifies. The network is not the exclusive link, it rides on top of cable and/or phone. A certain, generally wide, part of the frequency range is used. Baseband would be what it is opposed to and that would be something like Ethernet. The entire signal is for the network. The signal goes all the way down to 0Hz.
As a practical matter, anything faster than a modem in a home is "broadband." Very rare to find fa
Monopolies Are Bigger Than Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what the point of this story is. China's a mafia economy, Japan's is state capitalism, America's is based on cartels that compete within with each other, but primarily defend their mutual cartel from any newcomer. None of that is good.
A healthy Internet is one that's highly distributed, decentralized. The more ISPs per person, the healthier and more stable the Internet. The more Chinese it is, the worse.
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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
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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 governmen
What does "serve" mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this mean as actual paying subscribers to a private residence?
Or does this mean "providing internet access to" some large group of people who primarily use internet cafes, cell phones or some other shared access method?
Impossible! (Score:3, Funny)
The numbers simply don't add up:
-We know Chinese ISP's block all interesting content like pr0n.
-We know at least 95% of internet users browse pr0n almost daily.
So how can this be? :)
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No, we know that at least 95% of slashdot readers browse pron almost daily.
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You don't need the 'almost' in there.
I KNEW it! (Score:3, Funny)
People have always tried to tell me that spam is automatically generated, but I KNEW BETTER! I knew, deep down in my soul that it was really millions of Chinese peasants, hooked up to TTY machines, flooding teh intarwebz with router clogging texts and Bayesian fooling, poorly constructed English non-sense.
That's Okay (Score:2)
Sure, they have 20% of the broadband users. But after Red China Filtering they only have access to 20% of the internet. :)
Re:20%? (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet it's >75% of the infected/pwned machines if the logs from my servers are any indication......
Parent
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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.
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You don't really understand what was said, do you? Or maybe you don't really understand how ratios and percentages actually work.
Let us see. United states for example, consists of 4.5% of world population and yet consists of 12% of world internet users. China consists of 21% of world's population and yet consists of mere 20% of world internet users. Clearly the inter
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I agree. They should get a little competition going between several ISPs. What are they, a bunch of communists?
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Where I live in Britain, Sam Knows says I get to chose from the following:
Wireless - (not Wifi or HSDPA, it is a bit faster than that) - Now Broadband
Cable - Virgin Media
ADSL - BT, AOL, O2/Be Cable & Wireless, NewNet, Orange, Sky/EasyNet, TalkTalk and Tiscali (two sets of pipes)
HSDPA - O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, Three
Carphone Warehouse owns AOL, TalkTalk and Tiscali, so they have a total of four sets of pipes to my exchange
In addition, there are various virtual operators who use the pipes owned by