Slashdot Mirror
All New Homes In China Must Have Fiber Optic Internet Connections
redletterdave writes "Only a small number of U.S. cities can boast fiber optic connections, but in China, it's either fiber or bust. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has now ordered all newly built residences to install fiber optic connections in any city or county 'where a public fiber optic telecom network is available.' The new standards will take effect starting on April 1, 2013, and residents will be able to choose their own ISP with equal connections to services. The Chinese government reportedly hopes to have 40 million families connected to fiber networks by 2015."
However, even China is offering something Google and Verizon aren’t here in the US: Open access, and the choice of multiple service providers once the fiber is installed.
Um, yeah so you can pick from China Telecom and China Unicom which are both -- SURPRISE SURPRISE -- state run and controlled providers. So, yeah, go ahead and select between Super Auspicious Provider A and Premium Auspicious Provider B and think you have a choice just like Cox and Comcast are two sides of the same inept coin.
According to the China Daily report, the Chinese government hopes to have “40 million families connected to fiber networks by 2015,” which is almost one-third of the country’s entire population.
Emphasis mine. Anyone see a believable plan on how that's going to happen? I mean, I bet every government hopes to have a third of its nations homes on fiber networks by 2015 ... that sounds like a rather expensive project that you're not going to see a return on until the state owned providers pay it back though. You've got a state owned and state controlled newspaper telling you about something unbelievably awesome enforcing some totally unrealistic (unless there are few fiber neighborhoods) regulation. Am I the only one saying that I will applaud them when it's actually in place and working?
2015 is two years away. Um, yeah, they had better get crackin'. Well, I guess when you can just force the poorer farming people to work for free it might be possible! That little project was called “Speed up the Roads and Enrich the People” hahaha. Here's your shovel, comrade. Now start digging until you're enriched.
The skeptic in me is just thinking that the home builders in China just need to pay off one more inspector to get a structure standing. Hell, their sheet rock and cement are clearly bribed through quality control -- why not structural, electrical and fiber officials?
My work here is dung.
in any city or county 'where a public fiber optic telecom network is available.'
Any how many of these houses will meet that rather essential qualification?
Hell, I could install a fiber network in my house and run it out to the curb. But that isn't going to make any difference if there is nothing to connect it to, now is it?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
you can choose from Red Army #3 ISP, or Domestic Security Glorious Revolution ISP #1, or Internal Enforcement ISP #7...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Duh. if the network IS AVAILABLE of course it will be installed. The cost is negligible if you do it with the other services.
This is just some bureaucrats trying to take credit for something that's already happening.
Just about all residential buildings are poured concrete. This includes the walls which carry the load. Most AC wiring is done externally. Fuck up an internal wiring run, and you might not be able to fish it out. This leaves installing external conduit as your only form of repair. The idea of running glass is a smart move as it doesn't suffer from corrosion, attenuation, and interference like twisted pair or coax would.
Life is not for the lazy.
I wish this kind of authoritarianism was there to dictate IPv6 adoption in every country though.
We have authoritarianism, it just gets its power from corporate lobbing and campaign donations instead.
NC started a few public fiber in some towns, so Time Warner lobbied and made broadband operating as any other public utility illegal, ignoring the protests of many local tech businesses and even the FCC.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
How hard is it to learn Chinese?
Very.
Describe "small?" There's something like 20 million homes in the U.S. with a fibre internet connection. Not anything near the penetration of copper cable modems, but also nothing to ignore.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Since when is 40 million families 1/3 of 1.3 billion people? How big are these families? Either there should be another zero and it should be 400 million people, or this 1/3 claim is bogus.
40 million families represents ~10% of China's population, no where near 1/3.
Governments are the most miserable owners of infrastructure -- except all others. I don't know of any case of a public infrastructure going over to private owners and then improving with better services, more complete coverage and lower prices. Even privatizing telecommunication infrastructures in Europa was no privatization of a public infrastructure, it was just allowing private companies to compete either on the shared infrastructure still owned by a company whose majority owner in turn was the government, or with their own infrastructure they had to built themselves.
So roads and other infrastructure are all expertly maintained by the governments that own them?
No, but at least they are there and don't (directly) cost anything to use. VA on the other hand just opened the "hot" lanes on it's portion of 495 around DC and gave the ownership and all revenue from the tolls to a private company (yet we still get to pay for the state police and v-dot to monitor and maintain it). They say the cost of the toll is to be based on traffic, but they basically have a free license to charge almost anything they want (e.g. people will bear). They also did this by selling out the "greenway" portion of 267 and for the few miles between Leesburg and Dulles we've watched the tolls creep up to outrageous rates since there is only minimal control (and again it's the State that pays for the cops and maintenance while getting none of the revenue). They've also given away the rest of 267 (which was a serious cash cow for the state) to the Airport Authority which just jacked up the rates and will do so again next year. And this has apparently worked out so well according to the "Representatives" that got it done that they want to do more of it, yet they keep saying we don't have any transportation budget...
It's true that for the most part there are other reasonable options (mostly sitting in traffic with everyone else) to avoid the tolls, but if the people that pushed this so far have their way all the major roads are likely going to be turned into toll roads that are owned by private companies that get all the money. Thank you, but I'll live with undersized and over potholed roads that I'm already paying through the various taxes meant to pay for it (but McDonnell is trying to screw with that by removing the gas tax...).
The question of freedom on the internet is completely different from the question of a free market building the infrastructure. You think that if the Chinese government would one day decide to give internet infrastructure into private hands, it would allow free usage of that net? The government would certainly still maintain its Great Firewall, it would still control what people do online, and it would probably mandate that every ISP, to get/keep a license, has to provide a way for the government to listen.
On the other hand, you can build a government-supported infrastructure and still give complete freedom of what people do on it, just like in the U.S. you can drive to whereever you want when using state-built roads (well, assuming there's a road going to that place, of course).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sorry. Manipulation of the government is not capitalism.
In Portugal it's mandatory since 2009 to equip new buildings with fiber optic cabling from the front door to each apartment, two fibers for every client, and a telecom cabinet housing equipment ready to be connected to the service provider.
If the point is to point out that a fascist totalitarian state can implement broad policies more efficiently, then that's not news; the Romans understood that since 249BC when they appointed Aulus Atilius Calatinus as dictator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator
But even the Romans understood that there were likely some unpleasant consequences to be found living in a totalitarian state. But hey, they probably had the best internet access times of anyone in the ancient world, right?
-Styopa
At this point, crying for deregulation as the solution to every market problem is like a drug addict crying for more dope to fix their addiction problem. At some point, you've got to stare reality in the face and realize that there is no perfect free market, never will be, and that we better fix the rules of the game so that some asshole doesn't ruin things for everybody. Yes, having rules of the game doesn't prevent people from ignoring them, but it becomes blatantly obvious who the asshole is who is trying to ruin the game for everyone, and you get to kick them out before they do permanent damage (or at least permanent for anyone alive at that time).
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
How hard is it to learn Chinese?
Very.
Depends on what you mean by "learn Chinese". If you're only talking about the spoken language, then I'd argue -- from first-hand experience -- that Chinese will be easier in many respects than, say, Japanese or Korean. Just off the top of my head: Chinese is conceptually and grammatically quite similar to English: for simple utterances, like "I go to the store," the words parse almost as-is into Chinese as "I go to store" (only missing the article "the"), but translation into Japanese or Korean requires a major conceptual reworking into "store to go" (where articles are missing, prepositions are postpositions, verbs come at the end, and person is often implied by context). Chinese has no grammatical number or tense or person or gender, and verbs don't conjugate: and anyone, but anyone, who's struggled with "der/die/das", "está/estaba/estuvo", "touchez/touchons/touchent", "mouse/mice" and "goose/geese" but "moose/moose", will find Chinese incredibly easier in this regard.
Reading the linked article, I really have to say the author comes off as a horrible whinger. Of the nine concrete examples he tries to explain:
Basically, he comes across as a whinging, unworldly boob.
Even allowing for writing system issues, Japanese uses several thousand Chinese characters, with the added bonus that many of them have multiple, often quite different, readings, depending on the context. Imagine if the prefix "pre" was sometimes read as "fore" in some words, "pre" in others, and "front" in yet other words, but was always spelled the same. Chinese occasionally does that, but nowhere near as often, or as complicatedly, as Japanese.
Fail.
Japanese itself has at least three romanization schemes that I commonly run into: Hepburn, which most of us in the US will see and recognize as romaji (closest to "phonetic" spelling from an American English perspective); Kunrei, which the Japanese government uses on public signage in Japan to help foreigners (which has oddities like "zyo" for the sound spelled "jo" in Hepburn, and pronounced like the common given name "Joe"), and Yale, which was invented by academics for phonemic accuracy, but is horrid to try to read. So yeah, guess what? Languages not historically written in the Latin alphabet, and that have sounds not found in European languages, are a bitch to romanize. Have a look at the wild variations of Latin-alphabet spellings for Hebrew or Arabic words some day.
Fail.
Tonality? Even English has tonality, after a fashion. Try enunciating the difference between "record", the thing, and "record", the action, without changing your tone. Sure, Chinese has a lot more of it, and the truly tone-deaf must first learn to
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
We have, effectively, the same thing happening in Saskatchewan. Sasktel is the one and only true telephone provider in the province and it's mandated that every lot must have a connection with them (you don't have to pay for their service, but their wires must run to your house). They've recently introduced their fibre-to-the-premises service that will supersede existing connections. All new houses in our two largest cities are now getting fibre connections; old neighbourhoods are being converted one-by-one and smaller cities will start following suit once the big city rush slows down. So it's not just oppressive governments that can get this done, like other comments here suggest.