China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes

[donaldc]

From the article:

The standards will take effect from April 1, 2013, and will also require residences to offer equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want.

Amazingly, this means that China is now ahead of the U.S. regarding net neutrality.

Now, if they'd just do something about the Great Firewall..

[pfisch]

All of the various telecom companies are state owned. So I guess there is net neutrality in the sense that you can expect the same level of censorship on each state owned ISP which is really the same ISP.

Yeah, China is really showing America how net neutrality should be done...

In reality there is just one more official to bribe to build a house.

[ChuckMcM]

It is seductively powerful being a dictatorship. You can do things like this. Its not all its cracked up to be living with it though.

[guard-of-terra]

It's not just China. In many places in the world you have a choice of a variety of ISPs to subscribe to. Including where I live - it's not required or mandated but still taken for granted.

[tokenadult]

I have a choice of ISPs (none run by the government) through the TV cables that run into my home. Fiber-optic cables haven't reached our outer-ring metropolitan neighborhood. DSL took a long time to come here, because of where the telephone substations are in this town.

[ScottWhigham]

Wait - how is "equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want" the same as "net neutrality"? Can you elaborate how specifically China is "head of the U.S." in that regard?

[31reasons]

Its amazing what a government can do in the absence of powerful lobbying groups.

[objclxt]

Well, not all new homes - homes in neighbourhoods where fibre is already available. The article says that China is aiming for 40 million households to have fibre connections by 2015, which is just under 10% of the total households (if you go by Wikipedia's figures).

[davorb]

Doesn't this just make homes unnecessarily more expensive?

[richardjordan]

It depends what you mean by unnecessarily. Public policy has multiple goals and stakeholders. If your policy priority is high bandwidth to large portions of the educated population for the long term economic benefits - and if you feel that this dramatically increases your global economic competitiveness, thereby increasing income and living standards for all, then you probably don't consider the small marginal additional cost per unit as unnecessary.

[eande]

I live in Redwood City, actually Redwood Shores and just two days ago I saw one of the neighbors driving by with a new Tesla Model S. In my home I have AT&T and the fastest speed they can offer is 1.5Mbps. I keep looking for U-Verse here in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it remains a dream.

For my start-up I travel every 2 months to China, Shanghai area. Every time I go there and visit different places I am just astonished the internet speed many homes have there and the hotel I stay typically has 25M-30MBps. To me it does not sound like this new ruling makes them move ahead, I feel like they are already ahead.

[aneth4]

On the contrary, I lived in Shanghai for many years, and just spent a month there. Internet speeds, at least for accessing any sites outside China, are notoriously horrible, as anyone living there will tell you.

Using a secure proxy is often necessary not only for circumventing GFW, but to get usable speeds to western internet services.

Did you return from the future?

[Tloewald]

So now China will build unbelievable numbers of uninhabited homes in uninhabited cities with fiber internet access...

[w1ntermute]

What speed does this actually mean? 100/100?

[tomedme]

It means it feels ridiculously fast for websites inside the GFW.

speedtest.net results just run now (I'm in Shanghai, it's saturday morning, no VPN):

Shanghai-based server: ping 27ms, down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps

Beijing-based server: ping 31ms, down 17.49Mbps, up 0.55Mbps

London (UK)-based server: ping 270ms, down 6.17Mbps, up 0.56Mbps

I live in an older compound, my building has 12 floors, most of the others have 6, so this is not a new compound by any means, but we already have fiber, they're rolling it out gradually throughout the city.

[CitizenKane]

There are different service levels. It goes up to 100mpbs/100mbps symmetrical connection. In my case living in Nanjing I pay for a 50mbps/50mbps connection to save a little money.

Inside of the firewall it's basically an instant load for everything. Foreign sites are definitely slower but still feel pretty speedy overall. Without the firewall I imagine the speeds would be really incredible.

[wmf]

100 Mbps is pretty much the minimum speed for fiber; gigabit is not much more expensive. ISPs may offer lower-speed plans, of course.

[gommm]

I've got optical fiber here (20 Mbits) and my parent's ADSL connection back in France feels faster.. The GFW makes things very slow for any connections out of China and in China bandwidth for servers is insanely expensive (a lot of companies offer by default 5 MBps dedicated bandwith only when hosting), so a lot of servers are saturated...

[gbog]

No one mentioned a possible reason for this regulation: get rid of the mess with cables.

[jzwinck]

By adding more cables?

[mmphosis]

Just like solar panels (Made In China), I hope that this significantly brings down the price of fiber optic cable.

[Hello71]

Fiber is cheap. Hiring Americans to pull it through the ground (/tunnels/on power lines/whathaveyou) is not.

[wmf]

Fiber costs very little already.

[franzwong]

Unfortunately, China is not ruled by law.

[hhuio]

We need to do that here as well!

[rikacomet]

they may reach 50 million way earlier than 2015. nice! Good for us, at least, the global prices would come down a notch :)

[president]

More bandwidth for all that spying