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Olympic Media Village – Most Expensive Internet In the World?
An anonymous reader writes "Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1131.20 USD); for 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1342.95 USD); for 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1716.05 USD). That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can't believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!"
Possibly because at those rates, nobody can afford to comment! Media censorship has succeeded again!
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
must cost a lot to employ all the Great Firewall monkeys ...
I just can't believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!
As far as I remember, it is a specific requirement from IOC that the journalists have full access to the entire internet, so probably the connections go past the firewall. That said, it is still ridiculously expensive ;-)
Oh please.. I pay about $6k/mo. for my business's Internet connection (2mbps).
I am not an Internet company. This is for our office of 17 employees.
SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH!
And yes, they do block things at will here too. They didn't in the past (at least not for the businesses in the free zones). Now they do.
So, sorry.. no sympathy here.
how comes your company doesn't pay for it?
Who ever thought that the China was so capitalist? Well, Welcome to the club.
What?
Perhaps China has decided to become capitalist after all. Since the reporters need the Internet, why not charge them (and thereby their evil capitalist pig networks) ridiculous amounts of money for it? Perhaps they hope to recoup the cost of the Olympic Village?
maybe this is the cost of protection by the Great firewall of china
Seems like reporters could share their line with others and share the cost along with it. 1 simple wireless router should do the trick.
It's like any other event of this nature, everyone gets put in the vice for money. For example, apartment rentals near the Democratic Convention in Denver are topping out at (yes!) $30,000. But I'll bet it will keep the "illegal" bloggers down...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I remember getting insulted at a hotel because they wanted to charge me $10 a day for internet access. I certainly sympathize...
...However, one must also understand the economics of the situation. For our cable modems and DSL lines, the long-term subscriptions allow the initial investment to be recaptured over time. Does the same apply at the Chinese Olympics?
No, I will not work for your startup
deep packet inspection and analysis for all your communication is expensive.
So find another provider. Oh, there are none, are they? If people are willing to pay that kind of money, the provider will charge them. The real question is: as an IT contractor, can you afford NOT to be online during Olympics? This is an excellent example of a monopoly.
Communists overcharge CAPITALISTS...
;-)
You're a rich American, remember? I think they're putting the screws to you and pulling your leg; a coworker of mine just got back from China about 3 weeks ago and he said his hotel in Beijing had free wireless. Sneak into a hotel and give that a shot. What's the worst that could happen
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
From the post: "...for 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1716.05 USD). That is for only one month!"
apparently actually reading helps; that is for one month....
SOmeone hoas to pay for all the installation work - as a contractor the OP should not be so ignorant. You put tons of infrastructure in that you then rip out again. Yes, the price is high. But then - seriously - there is a lot of work in tehere, that just is not needed at all anymore once the games are over. So, people using things during one month of the games have to pay all the costs... ...that peopele with a leased line at hime depreciate over months.
And yes, the equipment can partially be reused. Partially - and the work is lost.
you went to the Olympics as a contractor to make money. now you find out tool you need for the job actually costs money instead of being free, a lot of money. well, so you assumed and fucked up. Are we learning yet?
You are a professional journalist covering the olympic games.
If this is more than a single digit percentage of your budget... you're not actually a player in that realm...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
F u china gvnmt.i rly wld lk to sy mre thn jst ths fw wrds bt th hgh chrgs ar nt afdble. f nly i cld b bl t wrt tht i dsprve ntrly f ths hgh chrgs i wldnt hv 2 b abrvted nd cd say f i hv bn absd or trtred o not. f i cd offrd 2 tll f i hv bn trtrd trst m i wld jst sy t. nywy i wl hv 2 snf nw bcz i m lt fr a prtst mrch in tinman sqr. i shld b bck sn, sry i hd 2 mk ths so shrt. nxt tm i wl c f i cn gt a discnt o nt. i wl c. ltrs bb, bckslsdt .. b th wy, i wt dd u tnk f th btmn mvie? t ws wmsm u rly shldc c t f u gt th chnce. hth ldgr ws gd, i thnk oscr 4 sre, nt jst ot f smpthy. nwy i wl c u ltr, b b, \.
Those prices are pretty high compared to normal consumer DSL, but if they're business-grade lines or 1:1 contention lines, that'd be about right.
There are alternatives 'tho; A friend of mine who got a temp job at INMARSAT is quite taken with the BGAN satellite terminals; They're way expensive, but work surprisingly well.
I wonder how naive the writer of the article is... It's common to ask ridiculous prices for internetconnections on such locations, it's for commercial use.. If a news-company can't afford the 1800 bucks for one whole month then it's a very bad news-company... Remember a normal commercial ADSL-line costs also way more than a consumer ADSL-line for the same speeds.. So the prices aren't even that high..
Every single person in the media village is attached to one of the media organizations covering the Olympics. That means every penny they spend will be 100% reimbursed by the corporation that has them out there. The company's already spending millions to send the manpower and equipment over there, what's an extra $1k here or there? And of course it's only for 1 month, that's how long the Olympics are.
This is the same as all business hotels. Your run of the mill Best Western, Days Inn, etc family chains all have free Wifi internet. Minute you go to any "business class" hotel or go within a block of a convention center, you start getting charged $10/day to $10/hr. It's all reimbursed through their company so the person staying doesn't care, and a company's not going to reasonably tell employees not to pay $10 to access their e-mail and work an extra hour from the hotel when they're paying $200/night anyway.
But the games only last about 15 days so it doesn't make sense to charge by month
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
...Here in Australia. Do they charge you for upstream and downstream traffic or is it unlimited....
In Beijing across the street from the train station, you'll find the International Youth Hostel. On the third floor there's the backpackers' club where they have six machines hooked up to the internet.
They charge 3RMB an hour. If you book it for the entire month, I'm sure it would cost much less than 7712.5RMB :)
For your information, a hostel room with two beds costs 180RMB and you share the shower/sinks/bathrooms. I stayed there for a couple of days. It was worth every penny and it was impeccably clean. I highly recommend it.
I pay 175 USD a month for a 64Kbps line, with a 4000 milliseconds ping to yahoo, as it is using satellite to connect to the rest of the Internet. One of the cables that they are promising to arrive next year is coming from Dubai. Really looking forward to that after the parent post :-)
Isn't it cheaper for companies to bring their own sat dish? Most large media companies use this kind of tech for broadcasts from the middle of nowhere don't they?
Internet cafes are still only 1 dollar an hour, and our office here in Beijing's connection with 2MBps up/down and 4 static IPs is about $130/month.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I am one of those people who just doesn't support the Olympics. This is not only because I don't want to support Chinese censorship and rights abuse, but, in general, the Olympics has dwindled into a commercial sham.
I won't be watching them.
Yes it does - that way you can charge twice as much. Seems the chinese have really got the hang of this capitalism thing.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
.... I always thought that in Communist China, internet paid for YOU!
I mean really. what did you expect? Some communist utopia where everything is "free"? It doesn't exist. Never has and never will.
You are at what will be the nexus of one of the most lucrative industries in the world for the next few weeks (sports, especially summer ones) and you expect the main access to the outer world to be what, cheap?
You can also expect it to be craptacular in that there is no other game in town and you *have* to purchase it at outrageous prices. Not that capitalism would have helped either (though, as one can probably tell I think that system is better) simply because the short term focus is so high and out of the ordinary. It will be good enough to get the job done, but not really any better than it has to be (and, again, this is more due to it being a short term spike in usage).
No matter the system you have - communist or not - there is a finite resource and some will have and some will not. No way around that until/unless we make the world Start Trek exists in with replicators (and even in that make believe world not everything can be replicated and there were haves and have nots) and then all of our economic systems will be obsolete anyway. As such expect to pay through the nose to be the top .25% or better in the whole freaking world, especially in one where mostly the main cities are wired and the whole thing is governed by a single body.
At the very least there is realistically only so much bandwidth one can send through and there is only so much upgrading they can do for a few weeks of high usage, my bet is that ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, and other places can easily consume most of it *and* have a lot of money on the line (both to spend and make) - they will get preferential treatment through being the ones who hog all the bandwidth either through artificial govt controls (in that above mentioned communist utopia) or through price controls (which takes into account scarcity).
In any case you loose.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
7712.5 / 31 / 24 = about 10 RMB
Myabe they charge per hour?
You kids today don't know how good you have it. Why, back in my day, I paid ONE WHEELBARROW FULL OF GOLD, every week, for a 75 baud line that I shared with my two hundred employees, their families, and their in-laws.
Oh, and it was half duplex! Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you -- and switch the wires around. Even during a thunderstorm.
And mister, you better believe that when we finally got an MP3 downloaded, we cherished it. We didn't just cram it in an iPod Shuffle and forget about it like these hoodla do now.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
This is the Olympics, the Olympics are about making money. $1200 for basic high speed internet access at the Olympics sounds about right. It's not reasonable or fair, but $1200 for a month of internet access at once in while/lifetime event sounds pretty affordable.
Suck it up, be a patriotic American, put it on your credit card! If it's that bad then split it with somebody else, or rebel by giving your internet away free...
Only if whining was an Olympic event....
M0571y H@rml355.
This is ridiculous!! The civil internet connection in Beijing only cost 44USD/Month for the 2M connection. Just think of it the whole Olympic village living is free of charge how come for charging such astonishing price for internet. That's totally absurd.
Then maybe pricing is based on a 36-months contract
If you are getting such high upstream datas rates, this is SDSL, not ADSL. Typically you will pay much more for SDSL than ADSL, anywhere.
That's not outrageous, the company I work for paid roughly the same prices for a 3 day convention at the Opryland/Gaylord Hotel in Nashville TN.
....to get their cheap stuff. Sorry, welcome to the real China! ;-)
will we ever change our view of basic amenities to include internet? i can't imagine anybody charging 1200$ per month for access to water, but maybe i'm naive here.
If you are not from big companies, if you cannot afford the internet, great, that's a good news for Chinese government. The idea is that "BIG BROTHER" simply dont want too many gossips spread out by lots of journalists from small organizations, at least not easily.
I work in Beijing and the internet costs there are pretty reasonable, closer to the general costs in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, etc.) than anything else. You can step into most Starbucks and use the free wireless in there. Even the hotels like Hotel 81 have free internet (LAN wire provided).
As a foreign Chinese, I mix alot with the locals and some of them treat me as one of themselves though others not so much. They have a big in-joke amongst all of them about ripping off foreigners especially whites. Of course, they also complain all day about whites taking away their girls. Not my opinion, theirs.
You'll be able to find reasonably priced stuff all over Beijing outside of the expats' area (Chaoyang) and the Olympic areas.
Apart from above-mentioned free/cheap broadband access in all medium to large hotels, China Mobile also offer free wifi access for major Olympic districts for the celebration of Beijing 2008.
Had you needed to use Internet in Media Village you can always subscribe to use China Mobile and Unicom's mobile internet access. Slow but very reliable for narrow-band transmission.
This high Internet access charge is in fact a penalty charge for those who still thinks China is an undeveloped country where Internet is scared resource. ^^
The Beijing Olympics' authority surely have a sense of humors in this case.
Well, that's covering the salaries of the team of people who'll be assigned to monitor and hand-filter the connection, including your email, web browsing, and IP phone calls ;-)
More likely it's an attempt to extract money from rich media companies - who'll just knock it off their taxable income anyway - but the censor army isn't as far fetched as I'd like to think.
It's a little scary that satellite or UMTS/HSDPA 'net access might actually be cheaper than local ADSL circuits, though.
In Communist China Chewbacca Defends you.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
East or west railway station? I suspect east, judging from your description of the Hostel. If so, they also have rooms with private bathrooms.
Oh, deary deary me. How terrible. I bet you hail from the good old US-of-A? This is the market economy, the triumph of capitalist economics; charge what the market can bear. Anyway, the less I have to hear and read about all this Olympic b****x the better, so raise the prices and raise the firewall says I
There are plenty of ways to get around this unless you critically need the full bandwidth at all times - share with your neighbor over WiFi, buy a cell-phone-based data card, stick a satellite dish out your window, etc., etc...
This is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money media are spending to cover the Olympics. When NBC spent $1.5 billion for their Olympic broadcast rights, and a $2k Internet connection reduces the chance that something will go wrong, how could they refuse it? They have plenty to worry about besides finding a cheaper Internet connection.
^^^^^ What this guy said.
Altogether now: WANG BA.
Again: WANG BA.
Now, if you're looking for one, you might want to ask someone "ZAI NAR WANG BA".
Look! Your expensive internet problems are solved.
I say find a few goldfarmers, buy lots and lots of WoW gold and then resell it to pay for your internet connection.
To find them, look for people with names like "dksfjskldg" or "agcfbgjr".
They will be either quite tall with pointy ears, or really short with a silly voice. Make sure to bring lots of ice, and if they start shooting at you or if they run towards you really quickly with a big sword, make sure to cover yourself with the ice you brought.
But watch out... due to the heat the ice will melt in like 10 seconds!
Sounds to me like an implementation of RFC 1149 is needed here...
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
that can create monopolies on a whim is abusing that power? I'm shocked.
oh, if only the media coverage were that contained...
Those machines are probably Windows only, locked down, and subjected to the Great Firewall, and there are only six.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Internet connections in reasonably developed cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Dalian, run around 600 RMB for 512kbps for a year, around 1100 for 1Mbps. Not too bad.
As for the Great Firewall, well if you want to read (in English) what the mainland Chinese netizens are doing on blogs and forums there is only one excellent resource: EastSouthWestNorth. Check it out. It has regular citizens burning down police stations, reporting on blogs with Chinese characters upside down, using 'corrupt American administration' for certain stories as an synonym for 'corrupt Chinese administration' (especially this post).
Oh.
Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events. So as long as you price it just high enough so it's not worth it to find some other way, they'll pay.
Plus, it might come as a shock to some people, but some resources do cost more in other countries. I'll take a guess that China's broadband infrastructure is _probably_ in an even worse state than the USA's. So to give a few thousands of journalists 512 MB/s full time, no throttling, they have to throttle the already poor connections of a few million other people. It will cost you.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't think I could type as well, or use punctuation and grammar and even spell all the words right like you did, if I had my head so far up my ass as you obviously do.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
I was paying around 100RMB (10 Euros) a month for use of a landline and a 1MB connection, which during offpeak hours was more like a 2MB pipe. This was only 1 year ago. Anyhow, a bit of advice to anyone going over, Secure VPN or just set up a TOR Proxy on a machine in the US.
We had been paying close to $1500 for three days worth of wired internet access and about half that for Wi-Fi until we finally got smart and just bought a couple Verizon broadband cards for our salesmen to take to shows. It's a case of they know you really need it, and they're the only game in town, so they charge what they want.
Stupid can opener! You killed my father and now you've come back for me!
Hurhur!!! Charge the Western devils top dollar for our superior internets!! Capitalism isn't all that bad when we're on the business end of a supply-demand scenario.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
These internet prices are similar to when they had World Cup Cricket here in the Caribbean last year. I was a volunteer so I heard of the prices. But then again, it's the media companies that are paying for it.
The reasoning for the high prices doesn't seem far off. Seems it is the regular pricing for internet at these world sporting events, for the media.
I have seen daily hotel rates of up to 30 Euros (that is $48 / day) for Internet access, at sometimes abysmal speeds. That makes it up to $1,500 a month as well. The most expensive countries were usually Denmark, Italy and Russia. It's funny how since once installed it costs close to nothing to have a network maintained besides the odd router crapping out and such, that hotels keep providing their guests with free unlimited tap water ( a much more expensive commodity), but all the while insist on charging people undue amounts for what should be free.
Most of the money you pay probably goes into a fancy system designed to authenticate, meter, filter your connection, and the hotel is in on the split.
Basically, this is a result of clueless aging hotel managerial types, for whom Internet was an un-necessary luxury, and who just see it as a profit center, not as something their guests need as much as the bed they sleep in.
And these people are easily taken in by the suave tone of a provider who comes in, does the network install, maintains everything and gives them the peace of mind of not having to worry about an area they are very uncomfortable with, besides a nice stream of income.
Worst ever: UNA Hotel in Firenze, (Italy) managed by Swisscom, you used to have to pay 8 Euros for 2 hours, no daily plans (basically having to refill every 2 hours) so the daily price would be close to 100 Euros per day for 24 hours access.
There are many hotels where the mentality is "Internet is something you do in the lobby" and is only needed for a few minutes, especially in Europe.
The best free Internet I got was 10 Meg downstream at Tokyo's Grand Hyatt in Roppongi Hills.
Z.
Get a china mobile prepaid card (rmb 100 )and have somebody chinese speaking call the service line to enable unlimited gprs for rmb200/month. it's slow but get's the job done.
but yeah, the price is crazy... one year 2mbit adsl in shanghai goes for rmb1500.
try going to a Conference/Exhibition. At BIO 2008 in San Diego, you were paying about that much for 4 days internet access.
Clearly you have a big nose and so can afford it.
It's your own fault.
Next time, get a smaller nose.
Max.
I just can't believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!"
PICS OR DIDN't happen.
2MuchMetaphor_EXPLODE
Why anyone would want to live there is a mystery to me. Is saving tax really worth living in a sterile cultureless city in the middle of a desert?
For your information, a hostel room with two beds costs 180RMB and you share the shower/sinks/bathrooms. I stayed there for a couple of days. It was worth every penny and it was impeccably clean. I highly recommend it.
I've stayed in Beijing in a two-bedroom hotel with private bath for 150 RMB/night which was also very clean (and far from being the cheapest clean room I've had in a Chinese metropolis), there are cheap places and if you speak a few phrases of Chinese you can go to the hotels where locals stay at and even haggle over the price. Then again I doubt there'll be much haggling due to the demand during the Olympics.
Heh, the prices are... interesting. Normally 10M optical cable with 32 fixed IP addresses costs about 8000-9000 RMB a month in Beijing. The kind of 2M/512k ADSL you mentioned costs 180RMB per month from the same ISP that is taking 11700RMB in the olympic village for it.
Fuck 'em. I'm here now... and watching rent-a-cop equivilants out the window stopping people riding two to a motorcycle and making the back person get off and walk just because there's some bullshit vote for the "best city" coming up soon and this somehow matters. They've closed down ALL the bars and ALL the KTVs (Karaoke) in town too. It's the same kind of rediculous reaction to an upcoming event as when there's a sensitive political conference about music piracy and they shutdown a few (pirate) DVD shops for a week or two.
The Chinese government is like an overcontrolling, overbearing, very illogical, very crude combination of a set of parents and micromanaging boss. They have no maturity for a nation this age, no politeness, manners, or logic based on any modern definition.
This is really bullshit. The Beijing government has rolled out Free WIFI in all the Olympic areas and much of the downtown.
The highest cost is on our children, you insensitive clod!
lol: You see no door there!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was involved in IT at the last Summer Olympics (Athens), and the rates were similar. There is no competition for service (the contracts are only awarded to one company), and the internet service only exists for 4-8 weeks. High cost, but everyone will pay it. Par for the course.
It isn't just internet either. Food prices also typically double to triple in the area as people start arriving for the Olympics. Welcome to supply and demand.
"ADSL service: for 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1131.20 USD)"
or 5 Euros for unlimited service.
I do a lot of work for trade show events and you should see what a big-city arena-type venue charges to drop an internet connection to a booth on a show floor. $1000 for a 3-5 day even is not at all uncommon. (granted typically at higher speeds than mentioned in this article and wired access... but for 5 days)
When you have a captive client base you can get away with amazing things.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
This is most likely a dual purpose measure being taken by the Chinese govt. Firstly, making internet access expensive does reduce the number of people using it. Less people using it means fewer people to keep tabs on. Secondly and I think more importantly, someone has to pay those people and buy that hardware to monitor your web browsing and blogging. I would expect that each subscriber to this service has several dedicated censors monitoring their line. They're probably just making the system fund itself, while at the same time providing a natural limiting factor to it. It's a very elegant solution really. If too many people try to subscribe to it, causing a problem getting enough censors and tech in place to handle the surge, they just jack up the price until it hits equilibrium again. It's a highly effective, practical, and simple solution to their need for censorship.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What everyone here didn't get from the OP is this:
In every other major sports competition held in a place where there's competition on the ISP markets, the ISPs usually invest a lot of money to sponsor the event and get free advertisement in exchange. Part of the investment would be in actually deploying end points and providing highly subsidized (if not free) access to the Internet.
In China, the ISP that provides connectivity during the games is probably partially-owned by the government, hence no competition. A lot of the cost that could be reduced by providing wireless connectivity (cheaper to deploy) is just not an option, since access to the Net needs to be controlled.
The OP is just suprised because he did not expect to see firsthand the effects of monopolistic capitalism. That's it.
in the US?
Something like Interop? You can easily pay $1000 just for a couple of days!
And addresses there must be really scarce! Look at how much they charge, Marge!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Imagine New York when the mob was running a lot of it. Now imagine the mob winning the battles with the police, and taking over not only the whole city, but the entire USA.
That's what China is and feels like.
So be careful, and give them whatever they want.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
But what am I supposed to do with all the leftover LMB?
Property is theft.
Obviously you've never worked a convention. At a trade show convention you'll see prices of $30,000 for a T3 for 5 days. This is pretty normal stuff.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Perhaps China has decided to become capitalist after all. Since the reporters need the Internet, why not charge them (and thereby their evil capitalist pig networks) ridiculous amounts of money for it?
Meanwhile on the other side of the pond, the government regulates the industry in a way that basically ensures affordable usage for everybody. What's it called when the community gets to share utilization of a resource? It isn't a perfect analogy because the internet in America isn't state-run, but the small fee that is charged helps keep the system honest.
Plus, we all know how things get abused by human greed when they are free.
===
On the other hand, the Olympics are a major world event and this is the first one during an era where mobile computing is so widespread that Tom & Dick Smith could theoretically show up and try to monetize the games by "covering" the Olympics on their blogs. If China sees the sheer volume of independent journalists as a threat to the stability of the network, then they are correct to shut it down by inflating the prices. However, I have a hard time believing that a city as large as Beijing isn't equipped to handle double or triple the internet load on a particular week.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
The organizing committees for the Olympic Games always charge an excessive amount of money for everything. As a contractor, I'm sure you have absolutely no idea what your room is costing, but I'm sure it is around ten thousand dollars for a mere three weeks. And the media housing is not a four star hotel.
Check out the rate card if you are really interested in cost inflation. A chair rental in the press center is usually between $300 and $600. And this is not for a nice adjustable chair--this is for a chair that would cost $30 to $50 retail.
Heck, everyone gets in the act: when I visited China last year, a first class direct business fare from New York City was under $1500. For the Olympics, that same flight was well over $6000.
You may also think the food at local restaurants is affordable, but I can assure you that the local merchants have probably doubled or tripled their prices.
There is nothing given away for free at the Olympics. Except for pins. And you usually have to trade for them.
Incidentally, here are a couple of other quick tips: China is not a democracy, don't drink the water ever (the locals don't), and make time to visit the Great Wall.
--Sam
We have to pay that same price for anything decent in Iraq.
Internet access in developing nations is expensive. Compared to the $350/month I paid for a 128 kb/sec connection in Nicaragua this is a bargain.
the Olympic village will rarely be used after the games, and there's no long term subscriber base to fully amortize the costs of wiring the village, so they simply need to charge the right amount to re-coup the costs.
this is similar to people in the middle of the Saharan desert complaining about $10/min satellite phone service and comparing it to free VoIP
Yes, it is certainly expensive compared to the price you pay for residential or business service. But if you compare it to what you pay for a typical trade show (or any event where the service has to be set up and torn down), the price is actually cheap.
For instance, the price to install an internet line to a trade show booth to something like RSA conference is on the order of $1000 for 5 days of usage.
That price is cheap compared to what companies pay at trade shows. I setup a both for my company and for just the three days with one IP it was over $1100 dollars. over $300 per extra IP and they added for renting equipment. consider there was 1500 boths, thats a lot of c$sh for just 1.5mb.
The Olympic organizers need those high fees to pay for the Digital Beijing data center, the 11-story high building designed to resemble a circuit board.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Over $10US per megabyte, I shit you not. When they switched from free to ZOMGEXPEN$IVE pricing without telling me (although on a different, slightly cheaper provider than I'm on now), I got a $200US data bill. Luckily I'd only done a little relatively light browsing that month.
From what I understand the connection in China is unlimited data at the given speeds. So, I've calculated that if you were to download over 110 megabytes in one month over my GPRS connection, it would begin to cost you more per month than the 512/512 Chinese internet connection.
Do more math yourself:
http://www.candwcell.com.bb/buzz/surf.html
(Divide prices by two for US pricing)
Also you're forced to use a proxy through this connection, preventing many add-on apps from accessing the Internet (at least on my Treo).
The biggest joke? Free unlimited data on Blackberries only for under $18US a month. That kind of corporation-on-customer hardcore gangbang action would be illegal to own in the UK!
Let's see if anyone can find anything more expensive than this. Hint: I haven't checked the data rates on the ISS.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
How about the athletes village? I will go to China in october to participate in the World Mind Sports Games. I just hope they won't charge us athletes for internet use.
Just a fast one.
In South Africa I pay +/- 30USD a month for a 384/128 line access. Then I pay a further 50USD per month to my ISP for a 5GB CAPPED, SHAPED access. A further 1.1USD/100MB if I exceed the cap.
This is from a country that likes to say it is first world...not in a thousand years...
To get a 4mbps (down) unshaped fibre line I would pay: DSL line: 60USD p/m, ISP: 900USD p/m performance capped. Over 100GB it drops to a 128kB downspeed.
Now put that into perspective where most people with access capabilities earn around 1000USD p/m.
So basically 10% of your salary goes to having internet available, 100% of your salary to still not have what people in the 1st world take for granted. So maybe not as much as the Media Village, but I have to pay this every month. I believe other countries in Africa are much worse off than this too.
We did an event in Shanghai for a single day, the internet costs for the event were pretty similar to the prices up north that you're seeing.
The costs for running internet were the same.
Installation fee's were the majority of the cost. The running cost for a business line is 3000 a month here. Installation cost was similar.
Home pricing is cheap in China. Business pricing on the other hand gets to gouging rates.
Lawrence / computersolutions.cn
Captive audience.
Seriously, what were you expecting?
I spent some time in China and I never had a problem with the Great Firewall. Even in the middle of Beijing, I had free access to Wikipedia, BBC, and other reportedly blocked sites. While I think that mainland China is a shithole (Hong Kong and Macau are pretty nice), I have to defend them on this one.
>>Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
From my experience in China, the Chinese are much more "capitalistic" than Americans. Sure, it's a nominally communist dictatorship, but at the individual level, they're very making-money-oriented. From kids hustling DVDs on the streets of Shanghai to nearly every vendor being willing to haggle with you, it felt more like a free market than any market I've been in in America.
But yeah, when they see foreigners, they see an opportunity to charge an order of magnitude more for something than they'd charge a fellow Chinese. When entering a subway in Shanghai, I heard something interesting, so I walked over to a vendor. He looked at me, said, "Rolex watch? 100 RMB." I looked at him and said in Chinese, "Oh really? You just sold one to that guy for 15." He laughed, and charged me the Chinese price.
Personally, I'm sort of confused why journalists are being required to live in a special village anyway - it's not like they are going to be interacting with anyone outside of their own bubble chamber there, and if they stay elsewhere they can get accommodations and internet access for much less, and probably just as nice.
Few places should get together, "buy" a few of the overpriced plans, hook em up to a router, and share amongst folks who subsidize.
Not like they will all need super high bandwidth to post on their blogs.
Supporting a communist nation and complaining about something there. The internet connection is the least of your worries.
Impossible, we have better prices in spain. ;-)
You've obviously never done any work at a real conference center. The rates you quote are pretty reasonable in comparison. At a mid-level hotel on the strip in vegas, you're going to be paying 1k per megabit per week, easy. Plus IPs. Plus a good chunk of change per switch port. And their wireless networks are set on STUN for any unrecognized SSID, which doesn't matter much as you already signed an agreement saying they can shut down all networking during your keynote address if you've plugged a router in.
Yeah, it's expensive, but you're paying for value provided. I'm sure your employer has an office for which they've paid royally. Stay after your shift and get your fix. Learn to to use Google Reader with Gears or another RSS reader. Use a real mail client and write at leisure and send at work. Anyone who's worked in Mobile IT understands that short term bandwidth isn't cheap.
I follow F1 and read the site grandprix.com. The guys there are wealthy enough, but they're basically freelance journalists running an unadvertised site and going around with "the circus" (an insiders term for F1, they travel from city to city putting on their show). From time to time they bitch about the internet access costs and facilities, here's an example.
Each circuit pays for the running of the event, something in the vicinity of tens of millions, so you think they could fork out for decent low cost (or free) internet access for journalists, but it comes down to money, the journalists often have to buy access at the circuit (rather than go back to the hotel or use a mobile), and big media companies need to report it, so there you go. They have a monopoly over a few dozen journalists 20 times a year.
Probably the same at the Beijing Olympics, or maybe the issue of the Great Firewall and locals, as others have touched on.
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
I'm too busy / lazy to google a supporting link, but by contrast the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Organizing committee has promised free (like beer) internet to all media, including 'non acredited' media.
It costs one Freedom.
Use the internet cafe around the corner, for 5 RMB/hour or whatever.
Dubai, being a port city, would seem to have an awful lot of natural resources at hand - not even counting the oil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
besides, you have satellites. use satellite internet. They can't charge you for that.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But all Jews are guaranteed the right to become Israeli citizens by the Israeli constitution, last I checked.
In Communist China, the internet pays for you!
Internet connections in reasonably developed cities (Beijing, Shanghai [shanghaiist.com], Chongqing, [thechonx.com]Dalian [daliandalian.com], run around 600 RMB for 512kbps for a year, around 1100 for 1Mbps. Not too bad.
That is true, but the price for freedom is not included in the rates you mention like it is in the Olympic village. "Normal Folk" technically aren't getting internet access for that much smaller price--they are getting "official Chinese network" access, which is not a free network.
The original article comments on how surprising it is that they have no free internet in the olympic village. The thing is, it is probably the only legally free internet in China.
This is like Free software--people get confused between "gratis" free and "libre" free. Just like rolling out Linux in a large enterprise, there is a cost associated with "libre" freedom. The global media demands proper access to the internet (not the national Chinese network that is filtered) so the dictatorship relented and allowed internet access to visiting delegates. It is deliberately priced very high so only those traveling from the Free world with generous corporate expense accounts can afford it, and "Normal Folk" in China are still shut out.
Sometimes, as is the case with Linux, the price of freedom is lower than the alternative, but in most cases, in much of the world, there price paid for freedom is very high. The price could be worse than paying a 1500% premium to freely interact online. Some people pay for freedom with their lives.
It's worth it, isn't it?
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events.
No other choices? They're forced to pay >$1,000/month for mediocre DSL? Wouldn't satellite Internet be cheaper than that? If we're talking about filing stories, couldn't they just use their cell phones as data modems?
Breakfast served all day!
Start getting used to it, especially in China. In 20-30 years we'll be working in sweatshops for our Chinese overlords.
One way to look at this is it's a one time thing. How many months will the local infrastructure they had to build out to support this event be in demand? One month. So they need to amortize their costs in that period.
Even at slave wages, half a billion censors don't come cheap.
Or, as the open source community might put it:
Many eyes make all political statements shallow.
First up, the dates: First possible install August 8th, disconnected August 29th. Now to the relevant quote:
Product / Rates / Move, Change, Cancel Fees**
Ethernet Service w/ Internet Access*
10 Mbps - Dedicated / $850.00 / $250.00
100 Mbps - Dedicated / $7650.00 / $250.00
1000 Mbps - Dedicated / $53,550.00 / Special Construction quote
Static IP address / $120 per IP address / n/a
* Bandwidth may not be changed after service is installed. Pricing is on a per plug or per connector basis.
** For 1 Gig ports, moves and changes will be permitted only on an individual case basis and pursuant to a special construction quote. For 10 and 100 Mbps service, special construction charges may apply, in addition to a Move, Change Fees, depending upon the nature of the move change requested.
Then a bunch of 'special considerations' such as the need to pay up front, ability for them to terminate the service if their 'acceptable use' policy is violated, extra $500 fees for ordering less than a week beforehand, that sort of thing. Oh and $6,305 (purchase only) for a router + IP phone package (phones not included, available separately for only $110(purchase only)). The small one that is, the big one is only $18,476 (purchase only).
There's more, but I've got a resume to polish. Time to get into the convention business.
shocking...I didn't know Comcast was in China as well.
I don't know why people don't get that Communism is just the limit of laissez-faire capitalism where the fittest monopoly goes to total success.
Regulate capitalism properly and it will never look like that.
I'm also in Beijing. Actually, I'm in the airport, typing this as I wait for my flight to leave.
One piece of advice on the great firewall, from one geek to another, is ssh tunnels. If you a unix box on the other side of the firewall, just fire up:
The configure you proxy to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8080.
Suddenly no more firewall. I'd say it's a bit slower, but saying the Internet is slow in China is redundant.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
I know that pain well - I'm in Western Australia myself.
Three offers laptop-based HSDPA broadband for AU$15/month, which seems to be the cheapest 'net access around given that there's no need for a phone line, line rental, etc. However, if you want to do anything that needs real bandwidth (and download cap) ADSL still seems to be the only option.
At least with the unbundled local loop services Telstra can be forced to let their competitors have direct access to the subscriber's copper tail - hence all those "Naked" DSL services. The situation has improved a lot since telstra was forced to set sensible pricing for ULL by the ACCC.
Telstra, by the way, charges $10/Mb (as opposed to Three's $0.10/Mb) for mobile data accessed from a phone without a data plan configured. That's how they ship their phones by default - and at advertised HSDPA data rates, that works out to $32,000/hour. They ship phones with no data plan and data unbarred. Nice guys.
Speaking of Telstra, the whole FTTN thing looks like a gigantic fiasco in the making - even now. Telstra's amazing demands that they be able to use the new - largely taxpayer funded - network in an anticompetitive and exclusive manner is just incredible. At least so far their arguments aren't being taken too seriously.
This goes to show, once again, how much less than the current one byte per character we need to store most text...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Really, have you never been to a trade show? Convention centers often charge these kinds of rates PER DAY.
this is depend on IOC. the fee before was nearly the same..
Renting a Broadband IC card or a WLAN from July 25 to August 25 costs 3,500 yuan (500 US dollars), while renting a WLAN plus info 2008 costs 8,450 yuan. (ref: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/30/content_8858535.htm)
and i thought my choice of verizon or time warner cable for internet (both of which slow to a crawl during peak hours) was bad at about $45 a month.