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2 Chinese ISPs Serve 20% of World Broadband Users
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world and both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Every other ISP trails dramatically. Japan's NTT comes in third with 17 million subscribers, and all US providers are smaller still. 'The gap between the top two operators and the world's remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly,' said TeleGeography Research Director Tania Harvey. 'Aside from the two Chinese companies, all of the top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.'"
Cat Power is better for all
Or something like that.
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And I bet the two ISPs serve different regions, in which case citizens wouldn't even get to choose between A and B.
Better known as 318230.
20%? That's almost 1/5 of all broadband users!
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
For all the complaining about lack of choice in a given area in the US, or other places, at least it's not the same company across the country.
BTW, China's percentage of the world population? About 20% last I heard. So really...does this article mean anything?
Keep in mind that in already saturated markets, like Tania Harvey says, growth of the market becomes pretty slow. Almost everyone in Japan, for example, already uses internet on PC or their cellphones etc. The companies may get customers to switch between them, but finding new customers is much harder.
Not to mention the "quality" of internet, one gets in China, what with half of it being blocked out/censored anyways. Long way to go before they catch up with the rest of the world.
So who's the http://hn.kd.ny.adsl/ guy then?
How is this really news?
At all levels, China's GDP continues to grow while western nations stagnate or creep forward. China is developing while the west has already developed it products and service offerings. Eventually, they will reach a saturation point like the west and slow down. But get ready to accept them as the 1# economic super power when that happens. Simply put, they have far more human resources to tap into. The only thing holding them back right now is local politics.
Life is not for the lazy.
The more providers the better. That way nobody has a corner on the market and if you don't like your service you have options.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
I bet if they deregulate they could get that down to just one ISP.
Do you define it as 256kbps(like the US did until 2 years ago), 1.5 mbps(at&t basic DSL), 10m(comcast), 25-50mbps(FIOS,uverse, next gen comcast)?
in the US there are plenty of users who cant yet get above 5 mbps.
I don't know what the point of this story is. China's a mafia economy, Japan's is state capitalism, America's is based on cartels that compete within with each other, but primarily defend their mutual cartel from any newcomer. None of that is good.
A healthy Internet is one that's highly distributed, decentralized. The more ISPs per person, the healthier and more stable the Internet. The more Chinese it is, the worse.
--
make install -not war
So why is this news? It has 20% of the people in the world, so it has 20% of the broadband users .
Does this mean as actual paying subscribers to a private residence?
Or does this mean "providing internet access to" some large group of people who primarily use internet cafes, cell phones or some other shared access method?
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I agree.....nothing like a good Cummins Diesel powered CAT.
I've been trying to figure out why everything I do online ends up in Mandarin. And to think I blamed my breakfast fruit of choice.
What matters is what you leverage it for, not how many use it- China has like 1.3 billion people right. And still it hasn't produced the great scientists, inventors, or respected companies. They are implementers and consumers, not innovators and are treated as such
How do you blindfold a Chinese guy? Dental floss!
Hey! That's the same number of ISPs I get to choose from in the US!
Individuals in the US may not have much for options either but I do feel a little better that our gov has to work a little harder to spy on our net traffic than they do in China where it's all centralized for them in one of two places.
This article once again proves the thesis that the world hunger will come when the people of China realize they are eating only the garnish. And that we will need the new IPv6 when the people of China realize that Internet is vital.
The Chinese ISPs don't give two shits about hackers. So there's all kinds of bad stuff floating around on them. Not only puts you at risk as a subscriber, but means you getting even more blocked. A company gets a bunch of hack attempts and mails the ISP saying "Hey, you've got a baddy on your network." Their reply is, and I'm not making this up "That's not our IP address," even though APNIC says it is. So then the company says "Fuck you," and shitlists the ISP.
These fuckers are eating all the ip addresses.
Broadband is any service where the line is shared with other services. So any speed of cable or DSL qualifies. The network is not the exclusive link, it rides on top of cable and/or phone. A certain, generally wide, part of the frequency range is used. Baseband would be what it is opposed to and that would be something like Ethernet. The entire signal is for the network. The signal goes all the way down to 0Hz.
As a practical matter, anything faster than a modem in a home is "broadband." Very rare to find faster baseband services (ISDN would be such a service) in a home.
Now if you mean what is high speed, well that's a different matter. Currently from my tests I'd say 10mbps is about the cut off to call it truly "high speed." Above 10mbps you don't notice much difference in normal use. Pages load immediately, videos play right away even HD. Basically you can scale the bandwidth up more and really not notice a speedup, other than for file downloads.
1-2mbps is about the lowest "non-suck" net speed. Below that, you are doing a lot of waiting.
This will continue to rise, of course, as more and more data gets on web pages. The larger the images, the higher the video, the more you'll need to keep the net feeling fast. However for now, I call it 10mbps the point of severely diminishing returns for everything except downloading large files. Of course that is becoming more common too.
Given that China also has about 20% of the world's people, doesn't this article simply mean that China is more or less average?
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
I have to say, the BEST blow job I've ever had came from this Chinese chick at a barber shop I go to. I went in for a quick trim, and after the old Chinese dude is done he asks if I need ANYTHING ELSE, and eyes his Chinese helper chick. It was like an extra service for regular customers. Hair cut and blow job $15. No shit. Now I get my hair cut once a week.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices.
That only applies to completely free markets (and sometimes doesn't even work there). It only applies there because with no competition, the companies can and will charge as much as people are willing to spend ("Oh? We are the only company that sells fuel in this area? Fuel that people desperately need. We can charge whatever the fuck we want!") and with competition they are forced to lower their profit margins.
A regulatory body can look at the cost of materials, etc. and say "You really would be able to offer the service for X... You arent allowed to charge more than X+Y at most. If you are too incompetent to offer the service for that price, we will find someone more competent.". Of course, you can call that a form of competition (and yes, competition can and needs to exist even in completely socialistic systems) and you would be correct... But I doubt it is the kind of competition you had in mind there.
The numbers simply don't add up:
-We know Chinese ISP's block all interesting content like pr0n.
-We know at least 95% of internet users browse pr0n almost daily.
So how can this be? :)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I can just see it now.... the first glimse inside one of china's ISPs... a single room, with a flashed WRT54G router in the middle of it.
People have always tried to tell me that spam is automatically generated, but I KNEW BETTER! I knew, deep down in my soul that it was really millions of Chinese peasants, hooked up to TTY machines, flooding teh intarwebz with router clogging texts and Bayesian fooling, poorly constructed English non-sense.
What a terrible summary. China ISPs serve 20% of broadband users, and Japan's top ISP only serve 17 Million!!???!!?. What does 20% acutally mean, or give us Japan's reading as a percentage of the world total.
Sure, they have 20% of the broadband users. But after Red China Filtering they only have access to 20% of the internet. :)
And right now, they all seem to be accessing the linked site.
We've got all the IP addresses.
Ian
China also has 20% of the world's population. Coincidence?