Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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?
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, \.
in addition to this, some of the hotels have VPNs to Hong Kong so get around the firewall and are therefore a bit faster and mostly uncensored. Win/Win!
Warhammer forums
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.
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 $130/month.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
News flash: China has spent the last 15-20 years transitioning to capitalism.
Depending on how you want to look at it, they're almost as free (some would say more free) in that respect than we are in the US.
Maybe not
You kids today don't know how good you have it. Why, back in my day, I paid ONE WHEELBARROW FULL OF GOLD, every week, for a 75 baud line that I shared with my two hundred employees, their families, and their in-laws.
Oh, and it was half duplex! Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you -- and switch the wires around. Even during a thunderstorm.
And mister, you better believe that when we finally got an MP3 downloaded, we cherished it. We didn't just cram it in an iPod Shuffle and forget about it like these hoodla do now.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I can do you ONE BETTER.
While I was in China for 3 weeks I visited over 20 cities (I think, it was mostly a blur) and had CELLULAR INTERNET the entire time provided by a local friend. I had a HELL of a time getting the right drivers to work on my laptop, especially since I could not read Chinese websites and instruction manuals, but I got it done.
It was fast and I never found a city without service. Ummm, actually... I had better service than I do with Verizon here in the US, and Verizon is pretty GOOD.
So I am just dumbstruck that these people have not found a way around these providers that are clearly "butt raping the tourists". I can see them getting together in a private room at a restaurant getting drunk of the local alcohol (which can be REAL strong) and laughing hysterically.
I would suggest he strike up a friendship with a local and get a card through them. I think I remember that it was around 100-150$ 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.
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.
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.
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
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
>>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.