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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!"
Seems like reporters could share their line with others and share the cost along with it. 1 simple wireless router should do the trick.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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
I can do you ONE BETTER.
While I was in China for 3 weeks I visited over 20 cities (I think, it was mostly a blur) and had CELLULAR INTERNET the entire time provided by a local friend. I had a HELL of a time getting the right drivers to work on my laptop, especially since I could not read Chinese websites and instruction manuals, but I got it done.
It was fast and I never found a city without service. Ummm, actually... I had better service than I do with Verizon here in the US, and Verizon is pretty GOOD.
So I am just dumbstruck that these people have not found a way around these providers that are clearly "butt raping the tourists". I can see them getting together in a private room at a restaurant getting drunk of the local alcohol (which can be REAL strong) and laughing hysterically.
I would suggest he strike up a friendship with a local and get a card through them. I think I remember that it was around 100-150$ USD per month, which is pretty competitive and even close to prices here in the US.
The strangest part is that the card is provided through the "postal service". They get it at their version of the post office. Maybe it was a translation error, but it was a strange deal. In any case I did not have to rely on the wireless in the hotels :)
If I remember correctly these cards should be compatible with certain 3G routers too. In any case, since the guy is supposed to be an IT guy I am sure he could find a way to share and even bond a couple of the cards together.
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.
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.
Same goes for most of Africa, where Internet costs upwards $10,000 a month for a 256K link by fiber (if you're in one of the eight coastal cities that get it) or by VSAT. Typically a 256K link is shared by 10 cybercafes, each with up to 50 users at once. Note also that average earnings are 20-40 times lower than in the USA or Europe, making the Internet about 40,000 times more costly.
This is not because of any technical difficulties, it's because of cartel pricing that keeps competition out.
My blog
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.
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.
(And just for the record, "redneck" does not refer to Irish or Scottish immigrants: it refers to people who work on the fields and have, well, red necks - due to sunburns. It's not a racist term, and for the most part, it's not even offensive.)
You, sir, are wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck#Etymology
Nobody writes jokes in base 13. - DNA
The Olympics are basically feeding time at the zoo for the well-connected. Most concessions are monopolies controlled by a few select vendors, and local officials get bribes and no-show jobs for relatives to keep things running smoothly. DSL ripoffs are just the tip of the iceberg. Millions are being stolen.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
That's because singing and any other free expression is prohibited in women. I don't actually know that for a fact, just seemed like a funny thing to say.
People are like slinkies; useless but fun to watch when you push them down the stairs
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
It is my understanding that all communication that crosses the chinese boarder, must NOT be encrypted.
I am not an internet expert, but it would seem to me that portions of the "full access to the entire internet" would be hampered by this law.
Can someone tell us what the Chinese laws say about encryption?
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
>>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.
Start getting used to it, especially in China. In 20-30 years we'll be working in sweatshops for our Chinese overlords.
Obviously quite a few Israelis are Jews, but not all Jews are Israelis. Again obviously, Palestinians are mostly Arabs, yet not all Arabs are Palestinian. Less obvious is that there are Jews who are native Palestinians, and Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens. It is far from a simple issue.
Oh, and in no way do all Jews support the Zionists or the occupation of Israel, conversely not all Arabs are against the Zionist movement and some wish success to the nation of Israel. Most in the region, Arab and Jew alike wish for peace and stability and an end to bloodshed and animosity. Its hard to see this though when all we have in the media are polarised soundbites of politicians propagandising, though the net is changing that.
History time, feel free to skip to the last bit. Israel was last under Jewish control around 200AD when the Romans kicked them out, naming it Palestine 'cos thats what the Greeks had called it for centuries.
It was then under the control of various empires, most recently changing hands from the Ottoman Empire to the British IIRC. The natives were mostly Arabs and Jews, with some European influences. Arabs and Jews lived side by side in harmony all this time, it was so happy that they had flowers and rainbows and lollipops and sunshine pouring out their arseholes. Well not quite, but it was about to get worse.
Zionism popped up near the end of the 1800s I think, wanted a homeland and started a mass migration to Palestine. This was going smoothly enough, fine by the Brits, but it was enough to start a counter movement by the local Arabs, who identified strongly with the Syrian independence movement and wanted the Brits out.
So anyway skipping ahead, after WWII and the Holocaust the UN backed Israel, and the Palestine conflict was born. Israel was reclaimed after 1700 odd years and it sort of pissed off the local resident Arabs that their ancestral homes were being taken and they were being shot up and forced to seek refuge in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere, where around half (5 million or so) still reside to this day.
Let me finish up with the six day war. In the sixties Egypt kicked the UN out of its territory which it had invited there (and had every right to kick out), it was all show, just posturing but Israel took the bait, shat themselves and preemptively struck out. Treaties between the local Arabs kicked in causing a war between Israel on one side, and Egypt, Syria and Iran on the other. Oh and Jordan. The Arabs got thumped, and Egypt eventually signed a peace treaty. I'm not sure the others ever did, and are probably still at a ceasefire or something. It helps explain the tensions between Israel and Iran though. I mean, if you got your arse kicked by your cocky little upstart neighbour you'd probably stay pissed for a long time.
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
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