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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.'"
Exactly, at least in the Beijing area where I live. They precisely delimited which area each company serve, and redirect you to the other one if you call them but are not in their area.
Actually there're choices - some time earlier the huge China telecommunications company broke up and became two separate corporations, with Netcom (later merged with Unicom as per orders from the government in order to "create more competition" and "optimize the structure") serving north China and Telecom serving south. They expanded into the rival's territories rapidly and actually competed with each other at the beginning, but the two biggest ISPs soon realized that competition was not a good idea for them and signed a "truce" restricting themselves to current distribution, for Telecom no further north and Netcom no further south.
And the "choices" are nothing more than different flavours of the same shit - you get the same shitty Internet (eh, Intranet with some access to outside) with different ISP advertisements (deep packet inspection & inserting HTML codes) fucking up your pages and trojan horse PPPoE dialers.
One piece of data for those thinking China is just about to take over: China GDP per capita $6,500 (slightly better than Namibia, slightly worse than El Salvador). by comparison USA: $46,000. As far as living standards go, China has a looong way to go and some major transformations on the way.
It's sometimes useful to think of China as two countries; a somewhat-developed country of about 400 million, mostly in the coastal provinces, plus another 900 million rural peasants. There's a formal registration system ("hukou") to enforce this division, tying peasants to their home area. It's not as rigid as it once was, but it's still in effect. Most of the economic gains are being realized by urban workers.