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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.
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?
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?
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
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?
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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.
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 :-)
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clearly you have a big nose and so can afford it.
It's your own fault.
Next time, get a smaller nose.
Max.
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.
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
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?
But Vegas is fun!!
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
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
>>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.
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.
Start getting used to it, especially in China. In 20-30 years we'll be working in sweatshops for our Chinese overlords.
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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