This article is a lie, I have been to Beijing last year. The public free wireless takes 15 sec to download a HD film. However, I tried again and wasted me 2 hours in melbourne, then I got a warning. Anyone ever live in China would realize the true meaning of surf the internet.
China only gets 9.46 MB / second
What a bunch of whiners.....
RIGHT HERE in New York State I only get 5.00MB / second and I pay $85.00 month.
So if you did the math and figured out how many MB/second in relationship to cost and how much the average user earns....
The Chinese are way ahead of the game....and we Americans are the ones "getting the wet end of the stick".
What a bunch of whiners.....
RIGHT HERE in New York State I only get 5.00MB / second and I pay $85.00 month.
So if you did the math and figured out how many MB/second in relationship to cost and how much the average user earns....
The Chinese are way ahead of the game....and we Americans are the ones "getting the wet end of the stick".
You failed to mention the average U.S. internet speed, which isn't anything to boast about. Why? Trying to protect the myth of American technologic superiority? Widespread access to rapid communication in the Land of the Free?
From a VPN:
Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are not available but not missed either, China has equivalent sites in full use. They may be censured and the GFW is in place but of little concern save those who wise to get around it and that requires techie assistance or purchased VPN. Something like Google Translate has Chinese equivalent.
The Chinese live on their cell phones and if you have tried to go on-line at that time of the day when everyone seems to also, you’ve discover speed is a sometime thing. My computer runs at the same speed whether with VPN or without, Stateside or here but there are sites not reachable without. Most news service save NYT and Bloomberg are available without VPN; WSJ, LATimes, Reuters,. etc. no problem.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are not available but not missed either, China has equivalent sites in full use. They may be censured and the GFW is in place but of little concern save those who wise to get around it and that requires techie assistance or purchased VPN. Something like Google Translate has Chinese equivalent.
The Chinese live on their cell phones and if you have tried to go on-line at that time of the day when everyone seems to also, you’ve discover speed is a sometime thing. My computer runs at the same speed whether with VPN or without, Stateside or here but there are sites not reachable without. Most news service save NYT and Bloomberg are available without VPN; WSJ, LATimes, Reuters,. etc. no problem.
Clearly the researcher just took the ISP's nominal speed numbers and did an average. If you do large downloads, the measured actual speed would be quite close to the nominal speed of Chinese ISPs. But the problem is that you don't do just large downloads. The Internet experience is mostly just accessing websites, not downloading large media files. Unfortunately, when you try to access global websites, even those that are permitted by the Great Firewall, the Internet in China feels like dial-up speed (i.e., 56Kbp, instead of 9 Mbp). The reason for this is quite simple: The Great Firewall causes a great deal of latency at every browser session even for sites that are permitted. For example, for the business sites we usually access, a webpage typically takes about two seconds to open in the US, and it doesn't really matter if you are using 5Mbs or 100Mbs. But in China, the same sites would take a minimum 20 seconds to open, and very often over a minute. Again it does not matter what speed of the Internet service you using. As I said, the Internet service speed only affects large file downloads.
So, basically, what you're telling me is that it takes citizens of China a long time to find out that all of the websites they want to visit have been blocked by their oppressive government...
"Many people in China do not watch videos hosted on non-Chinese servers because the videos download or stream too slowly."
I don't know how this could make sense unless all providers in China has different throttles for different domains, based on where those servers are located. If "internet is slow," it should be slow across the board, unless providers deliberately has had speed bumps for non-Chinese servers. Hmm, food for thoughts.
Right now, China is the second largest (soon-to-be the largest) economy in the world. Its locally grown internet giants like Alibaba and startups alike like to tout how connected the Chinese users are locally. Yet, China ranked 91st among almost 200 countries in terms of internet speed. That's quite an impediment for these Chinese companies.
If Beijing wants to seriously challenge the West (and all those tech giants in the West, like google and facebook), they would have to loosen their grip. Yet, by nature or out of natural reflexes, Beijing would never do that. How they find the right balance to allow provide pathways for tech services to truly take hold in China, or not, would certainly be interesting to see.
I don't know how this could make sense unless all providers in China has different throttles for different domains, based on where those servers are located. If "internet is slow," it should be slow across the board, unless providers deliberately has had speed bumps for non-Chinese servers. Hmm, food for thoughts.
Right now, China is the second largest (soon-to-be the largest) economy in the world. Its locally grown internet giants like Alibaba and startups alike like to tout how connected the Chinese users are locally. Yet, China ranked 91st among almost 200 countries in terms of internet speed. That's quite an impediment for these Chinese companies.
If Beijing wants to seriously challenge the West (and all those tech giants in the West, like google and facebook), they would have to loosen their grip. Yet, by nature or out of natural reflexes, Beijing would never do that. How they find the right balance to allow provide pathways for tech services to truly take hold in China, or not, would certainly be interesting to see.
1
The article reports on a study primarily undertaken to discover the level of internet use, country-by-country.
But instead of internet usage, the reporter mainly focuses on national download speeds and identifies China as #91. Meanwhile, the article provides comparable rankings for only a few other countries -- no world average, no USA speed, no comparison of urban vs. rural, no table of speeds for all 200 nations.
So evidently the reporter is not very interested in internet download speeds after all. He does tell us, however, that China has a national internet firewall that it uses to control political content on its national internet. And we learn that some people in China often use VPN's to gain access to information outside of China. Also, going through a VPN slows down one's connection. Not only that, but the guy who developed China's internet firewall was recently inconvenienced when his VPN connection was slow. (Both funny and ironical, right?)
The way this story was written creates (in me) the impression that the reporter's agenda from the outset was to describe China's censorship of the internet -- and that he used the recent report on internet speeds merely to bring 'China' and 'internet' together into the same story. After that was accomplished, the original study was forgotten.
Now, I agree with the reporter's opinion of China. However, I prefer to see opinion pieces gathered together on the op/ed page, instead of blended in with the news.
But instead of internet usage, the reporter mainly focuses on national download speeds and identifies China as #91. Meanwhile, the article provides comparable rankings for only a few other countries -- no world average, no USA speed, no comparison of urban vs. rural, no table of speeds for all 200 nations.
So evidently the reporter is not very interested in internet download speeds after all. He does tell us, however, that China has a national internet firewall that it uses to control political content on its national internet. And we learn that some people in China often use VPN's to gain access to information outside of China. Also, going through a VPN slows down one's connection. Not only that, but the guy who developed China's internet firewall was recently inconvenienced when his VPN connection was slow. (Both funny and ironical, right?)
The way this story was written creates (in me) the impression that the reporter's agenda from the outset was to describe China's censorship of the internet -- and that he used the recent report on internet speeds merely to bring 'China' and 'internet' together into the same story. After that was accomplished, the original study was forgotten.
Now, I agree with the reporter's opinion of China. However, I prefer to see opinion pieces gathered together on the op/ed page, instead of blended in with the news.
4
According to IIS (Internetstatistik.se), in 2015, the average downstream speed here in Sweden was 59 Mb/s (p 8), the average upstream speed 26 Mb/s (p 6)....
Henri
Henri
Thought question: is it really the "Internet" if it's curated, filtered, and throttled by a state agency?
The general message conveyed by so many Times’ articles on China is of the ‘those poor people’ variety ‘. Don’t believe it. Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are not available but not missed either, China has equivalent sites in full use.
They may be censured and the GFW is in place but of little concern save those who wise to get around it and that requires techie assistance or purchased VPN. Something like Google Translate has Chinese equivalent.
The Chinese live on their cell phones and if you have tried to go on-line at that time of the day when everyone seems to also, you’ve discover speed is a sometime thing.
My computer runs at the same speed whether with VPN or without, Stateside or here but there are sites not reachable without. Most news service save NYT and Bloomberg are available without VPN. 668 million users can slow things down, morning and evening.
They may be censured and the GFW is in place but of little concern save those who wise to get around it and that requires techie assistance or purchased VPN. Something like Google Translate has Chinese equivalent.
The Chinese live on their cell phones and if you have tried to go on-line at that time of the day when everyone seems to also, you’ve discover speed is a sometime thing.
My computer runs at the same speed whether with VPN or without, Stateside or here but there are sites not reachable without. Most news service save NYT and Bloomberg are available without VPN. 668 million users can slow things down, morning and evening.
1
Mine is 3 mbps at my home . Probably less on this phone.
1
So far nobody mentioned Arab Spring. Remember how the western media heaped praise on Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc for helping to topple Qaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, ... and threw Syria into the disastrous civil war that flooded Europe with waves of refugees? Brexit is a real possibility and it is only a matter of time that a ultra right-wing party will be elected in Europe.
The world cannot absorb so much chaos and unrest all at once. China's internet speed ranked 91st in the world. So What? Millions of Chinese use the internet. They are inconvenienced but not deprived. China's Great Firewall is doing the job.
None of the American presidential candidates make improving internet speed in USA to the level of South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Japan and the Netherlands their platform. Internet speed is not a significant measure of how "exceptional" a country is. But nominating Trump certainly is.
The world cannot absorb so much chaos and unrest all at once. China's internet speed ranked 91st in the world. So What? Millions of Chinese use the internet. They are inconvenienced but not deprived. China's Great Firewall is doing the job.
None of the American presidential candidates make improving internet speed in USA to the level of South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Japan and the Netherlands their platform. Internet speed is not a significant measure of how "exceptional" a country is. But nominating Trump certainly is.
11
But but Elizabeth Warren and other anti-Obama trade demagogues assure us that the yellow peril is upon us.
4
They must have been reading comments on Times and elsewhere.
It will be interesting to see how trendendo ranks the best internet in the world.
Average of ~10Mbps is actually not too shabby for broadband access and in one's everyday use it probably won't make too much difference from 20Mbps enjoyed by top ranking countries. As rightfully mentioned in the report, when I was in China the major problem is not the speed, but the ridiculous censorship imposed by the government. Everytime the very moment I turn on my phone when I arrived in China's airport, I knew all Google services like gmail are totally dead, not to mention the numerous websites I won't be able to visit, including NYTimes. It's hard for people in US who have never been to China to imagine what a heavily censored internet feels like. The Great Firewall (GFW) is no joke. Everytime I come back to US it feels literally a breath of fresh that I can visit all the websites in the world with no hassle, no VPN.
8
Indeed. Unless users are watching movies or gaming, 9-10Mbps can handle most every websites just fine with reasonable expediency.
We would feel suffocated for not being able to access all those services that we use everyday (gmail etc). But for those Chinese who never ever use them in the first place, they are none the wiser because there's simply no comparison.
We would feel suffocated for not being able to access all those services that we use everyday (gmail etc). But for those Chinese who never ever use them in the first place, they are none the wiser because there's simply no comparison.
2
China's GDP per capita is 98th. in the world.
2
Volume, is what counts in China. Not per capita. Size matters when you move in huge mass.
1
Yes, that is what most people seem to forget. China is a very poor country - the internet speed is similar.
That a few privileged foreign journalists and their friends in Beijing are in convenience in their internet usage is really not that newsworthy.
That a few privileged foreign journalists and their friends in Beijing are in convenience in their internet usage is really not that newsworthy.
Er...nicely written article re China but where is the rankling list of nations in an easy to see place?
That is what I am interested in and I am sure others are too...
That is what I am interested in and I am sure others are too...
11
The internet speed is important for the Chinese countryside where rural businessmen have been striving for a more convenient e-commerce trading environments in a wide range of burgeoning Taobao villages, including one called Junpu, whose government claims that its broadband quality is even better than that in Canton, the capital of Guangdong.
"Last October, a report on internet freedom by Freedom House, a prominent American pro-democracy group, ranked China last among 65 nations".
Yet 80 percent of Chinese – who are considerably smarter and better traveled than us – trust the information they receive through their government media, while only 40 percent of us trust ours.
That stat is actually in line with other countries' trust of their government media: in almost every country people trust government-owned media 2:1 over private media.
Yet 80 percent of Chinese – who are considerably smarter and better traveled than us – trust the information they receive through their government media, while only 40 percent of us trust ours.
That stat is actually in line with other countries' trust of their government media: in almost every country people trust government-owned media 2:1 over private media.
3
"Yet 80 percent of Chinese – who are considerably smarter and better traveled than us "
Any evidence to back up this claim?
Maybe most Chinese "trust " their media because they have no other option. Similar to Fox News viewers - they don't realize how truly ignorant they are because they hear and see only what their echo chamber of a media feeds them.
I'm sure those Chinese travelers that see media coverage in other countries openly begin to question the view of the world they have been given in China. No wonder last year and continuing into this year, Chinese have taken out nearly 6 Trillion RMB out of China and invested in real estate in the US, Canada and Europe.
Any evidence to back up this claim?
Maybe most Chinese "trust " their media because they have no other option. Similar to Fox News viewers - they don't realize how truly ignorant they are because they hear and see only what their echo chamber of a media feeds them.
I'm sure those Chinese travelers that see media coverage in other countries openly begin to question the view of the world they have been given in China. No wonder last year and continuing into this year, Chinese have taken out nearly 6 Trillion RMB out of China and invested in real estate in the US, Canada and Europe.
It would have been nice to have a table of nations' internet speeds and a link to a good source. Where is the USA in the list? But we have 2 speeds actually: haves and have nots.
8
So where does the United States rank? Don't you think that would be a key piece of information in this story?
17
US seems to be 14th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_s...
So where's the US on this list? Did I miss a link to the site??
15
local sites can be fast during normal days but it isn`t really as fast as i`m used to in europe and not as stable.
And then we have foreign sites which are terribly slow even the ones not even censored. the loading time feels like set back to the mid 90`s.
A VPN can serve well but on some days like whenever there is something going on like the demonstrations in hongkong against the mainland goverment or the missle pointing at taiwan the all over internet gets a new low. if You need access foreign pages for work.... consider it a day off, coz with min 8KB- max 320KB a sec You don`t get anywhere.
the internet speed on paper is definitely not what You get. my 5MB/s internet in germany was way faster and reliable.