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China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes
- rikacomet 14y agothey may reach 50 million way earlier than 2015. nice! Good for us, at least, the global prices would come down a notch :)
- president 14y agoMore bandwidth for all that spying
- w1ntermute 14y agoWhat speed does this actually mean? 100/100?
- wmf 14y ago100 Mbps is pretty much the minimum speed for fiber; gigabit is not much more expensive. ISPs may offer lower-speed plans, of course.
- te_chris 14y agoTell that to New Zealand then, we're in the process of doing (what appears like a bit of a mess of) a fibre rollout here. All the plans are 30/10 with the "premium ones" being 100/50.
- GauntletWizard 14y agoThat's the internet plan, not the physicality of the link; I have an (absolutely awesome for the US, still shit in my opinion) 35/10 plan from Frontier in the suburbs of Seattle, but the physical link is 100M, they throttle it at the switch.
- justincormack 14y agoIn the UK most fibre is to the street with ADSL over copy for the last bit. I get 40/20 from that. I presume the street gets gigabit.
- tomedme 14y agoIt means it feels ridiculously fast for websites inside the GFW. speedtest.net results just run now (I'm in Shanghai, it's saturday morning, no VPN): Shanghai-based server: ping 27ms, down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps Beijing-based server: ping 31ms, down 17.49Mbps, up 0.55Mbps London (UK)-based server: ping 270ms, down 6.17Mbps, up 0.56Mbps I live in an older compound, my building has 12 floors, most of the others have 6, so this is not a new compound by any means, but we already have fiber, they're rolling it out gradually throughout the city.
- w1ntermute 14y ago> down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps That doesn't seem that fast to me. I get better speeds out in the Midwest in America, where internet is supposed to be super shitty. Particularly, I was expecting a symmetric connection.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoThis is actually pretty good for inside the GFW; keep in mind links are typically overloaded to the resource you are accessing, its not just about your final leg speed. So fiber really only fixes one part of the connection, Amdahl's law still applies. Oddly enough, I actually sometimes find sites outside the GFW are a bit faster compared to some domestic Chinese sites inside the GFW. The internal Chinese internet just has lots of problems that they haven't worked through yet.
- tomedme 14y agoCorrect. I added the day and time for reference, in the evenings during the week, the internet speed can be rated as "lol" in both directions. w1ntermute, I'm fully aware those speeds are most definitely not fast, but relatively speaking it's usually worse than that. (I love going to South Korea, I land at Incheon, there's free WiFi in the coach to the city, and the internet is FAST)
- w1ntermute 14y ago> keep in mind links are typically overloaded to the resource you are accessing, its not just about your final leg speed. So fiber really only fixes one part of the connection, Amdahl's law still applies. Is the last mile not the bottleneck in China? It is in America, AFAIK.
- CitizenKane 14y agoThere are different service levels. It goes up to 100mpbs/100mbps symmetrical connection. In my case living in Nanjing I pay for a 50mbps/50mbps connection to save a little money. Inside of the firewall it's basically an instant load for everything. Foreign sites are definitely slower but still feel pretty speedy overall. Without the firewall I imagine the speeds would be really incredible.
- objclxt 14y agoWell, not all new homes - homes in neighbourhoods where fibre is already available. The article says that China is aiming for 40 million households to have fibre connections by 2015, which is just under 10% of the total households (if you go by Wikipedia's figures).
- donaldc 14y agoFrom the article: The standards will take effect from April 1, 2013, and will also require residences to offer equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want. Amazingly, this means that China is now ahead of the U.S. regarding net neutrality. Now, if they'd just do something about the Great Firewall..
- guard-of-terra 14y agoIt's not just China. In many places in the world you have a choice of a variety of ISPs to subscribe to. Including where I live - it's not required or mandated but still taken for granted.
- pfisch 14y agoAll of the various telecom companies are state owned. So I guess there is net neutrality in the sense that you can expect the same level of censorship on each state owned ISP which is really the same ISP. Yeah, China is really showing America how net neutrality should be done... In reality there is just one more official to bribe to build a house.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoIt is seductively powerful being a dictatorship. You can do things like this. Its not all its cracked up to be living with it though.
- w1ntermute 14y agoI hope China goes the way of South Korea and Taiwan. A transition to democracy once the economy's improved enough. The only problem is that its size means that China can't take the export oriented path to growth at the same rate that SK/Taiwan did.
- dnu 14y agoOn the other hand, China has a lot of investment to do in its western part of the country.
- hhuio 14y agoWe need to do that here as well!
- davorb 14y agoDoesn't this just make homes unnecessarily more expensive?
- richardjordan 14y agoIt depends what you mean by unnecessarily. Public policy has multiple goals and stakeholders. If your policy priority is high bandwidth to large portions of the educated population for the long term economic benefits - and if you feel that this dramatically increases your global economic competitiveness, thereby increasing income and living standards for all, then you probably don't consider the small marginal additional cost per unit as unnecessary.
- dmix 14y agoI'm with the original commentor. The first question we should ask if not "does this provide value to the individuals in a specific group?" but what are the unintended consequences for everyone in the economy? This is explored very well in the book "Economics in One Lesson": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson
- richardjordan 14y agoQuestions we ask are not going to influence policy in China which runs by a different set of rules.
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- mmphosis 14y agoJust like solar panels (Made In China), I hope that this significantly brings down the price of fiber optic cable.
- gbog 14y agoNo one mentioned a possible reason for this regulation: get rid of the mess with cables.
- Tloewald 14y agoSo now China will build unbelievable numbers of uninhabited homes in uninhabited cities with fiber internet access...
- gommm 14y agoI've got optical fiber here (20 Mbits) and my parent's ADSL connection back in France feels faster.. The GFW makes things very slow for any connections out of China and in China bandwidth for servers is insanely expensive (a lot of companies offer by default 5 MBps dedicated bandwith only when hosting), so a lot of servers are saturated...
- eande 14y agoI live in Redwood City, actually Redwood Shores and just two days ago I saw one of the neighbors driving by with a new Tesla Model S. In my home I have AT&T and the fastest speed they can offer is 1.5Mbps. I keep looking for U-Verse here in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it remains a dream. For my start-up I travel every 2 months to China, Shanghai area. Every time I go there and visit different places I am just astonished the internet speed many homes have there and the hotel I stay typically has 25M-30MBps. To me it does not sound like this new ruling makes them move ahead, I feel like they are already ahead.
- aneth4 14y agoOn the contrary, I lived in Shanghai for many years, and just spent a month there. Internet speeds, at least for accessing any sites outside China, are notoriously horrible, as anyone living there will tell you. Using a secure proxy is often necessary not only for circumventing GFW, but to get usable speeds to western internet services. Did you return from the future?
- franzwong 14y agoUnfortunately, China is not ruled by law.