Internet in China Vs Malaysia

During the last lecture in our class, we have a group present about the information system available in China by our foreigner classmate (from China). In the last of the presentation, Madam has asked a question concern about internet in China toward the presenter. And this has grasped my attention. Before that, I even think about the internet issues in our country and also compare it to others country. So, this time I would like to share with you with the internet issues in different country.

Before I proceed to the comparison, I would like to share with you about my bad experiences with our local internet services provider. I think you all are very familiar with “cool uni pack” right? You know I take how long to get this packages? Half and a year! Yes, I’m not written it wrong. Even take half an a year but it only work when I complained it to Pusat Khidmat Aduan Pengguna Nasional (NCCC). There is a lot of reasons this local internet provider want to reject my application and I don’t want too discuss too much about this. The main issue that I want to say here is about their services! If I rank it to: 1=very good, 10= very poor, I will rate them as 11! Wrong information, slow in conduct or solve the problem, attitude and many many many that I don’t like.

Ok, let’s continue with the comparison because if I still continue with my experience I’m sure I will become a volcano explosion. Today, China is one of the easiest country in the Asia to make internet accessible to businesses, homes, travellers and students. If you are a business traveller or tourist, you will be pleasantly surprised that almost all hotels, down to 3 stars hotels, even in more remote Chinese cities offer broadband internet access in their hotel rooms. Most rooms will have an ethernet port for you to hook up to the hotel's broadband. Access is mostly automatically DHCP with dynamic IPs but in certain Chinese hotels, you may need to call the reception to allow access from your room. Home users are well taken care of as well. Many new apartment also comes with broadband access or you can apply to the Chinese Telecoms directly. Charges for monthly sDSL broadband can be as low as US$12 @ RM 36.20 for 2Mbits of access speed or even better.

Internet Service Provider Directory: (I just list down the most popular provider)

Name:	Broadband:	Subscribers:
China Telecom 31,Jinrong Street Xicheng District, Bejing, China 100032 8610-5850-1688	DSL	19,170,000
China Netcom No. 1, Beihuan Donglu, Beijing Development Area Beijing, China 100176	DSL	8,000,000
Great Wall Broadband No. 2 Great Wall Technology Building Kefa Road, Nanshan District Shenzhen, China 518057 0755-2672-8686	DSL	4,000,000

Source retrieved from: http://www.birds-eye.net/directory/china.htm

CHINANET, the world's largest Internet network reaches more subscribers in Asia than any other IP network and provides direct connections to all major global ISPs, enabling global traffic routing. CHINANET has more than 10 million registered customers and provides daily access for more than 28 million people. China Telecom IP network services are delivered over our international 40Gbps MPLS-enabled IP backbone, and are backed by industry-leading service level agreements (SLAs) and are competitively priced to ensure our customers receive superior performance, reliability and value. As your IP activities grow, our high capacity, fully-managed network lets you easily add bandwidth to quickly and cost-effectively increase performance. Benefits Accessibility : Customers access our IP network by using their choice of access technologies, including IP, private line, ATM and Frame Relay. International : Our Dedicated International Access service is currently available in the U.S., China, Hong Kong and the world. Our global peering enables us to connect you to the world. We use owned undersea cable capacity, to connect our networks in both China and the U.S. We offer the leading international SLAs to and from China: 99.99 percent availability, packet loss of less than 3 percent, and round trip latency of less than 180ms between the U.S. and China. Flexible Bandwidth Options : China Telecom Dedicated Internet Access can be provisioned at speeds of DS-1, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, all Ethernet speeds, and Gigabyte Ethernet speeds. Our IP backbone is highly scalable and expandable to provide a range of capacity, allowing customers to choose the bandwidth they need. Features Scalable port speeds (Nx64, T1, DS-3, OC-3, Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet) Single global AS number in the U.S. and China Private and public peering Flexible billing options (flat fee or usage based) IP addresses BGP4-enabled Real-time traffic reports

Source: www.chinatelecomusa.com

How much does the Internet access cost?

China Telecom are providing broadband access service for Internet users without pay for start-up fees. Broadband access service has divided in to: 512 Mbps and I Gbps. The fees for 512 Mbps is around RMB.90-100/month (unlimited access), and for 1 Gbps is around RMB.120-130/month @ RM 55.39 to RM 60.16 (unlimited access).

Control of the internet

China is one of the countries with strict internet laws. Having said that, internet usage in China is very, very common and popular for both business and personal use and not tightly controlled as may be often portrayed by Western media. Because personal computers are still relatively expensive by China's income standard, most people access the internet from cybercafes or from offices.

All websites hosted in China need to be a approved by a government unit. One of the first thing you will notice in China is that domestic sites are blazingly fast but foreign hosted sites tend to be very slow. This is due to foreign sites having to go through a proxy(for Chinese censorship purposes) as well as a bottleneck on China's limited conduit out to the international internet pipes. It is better to host your website within China if you intend your main audience to be in China.

Many foreign sites such as CNN, Falungong, Playboy and other sites deem sensitive to China's society are blocked.

Quick interesting video clip that show the increasing of the population in China and comparison internet users in China and U.S..
Source retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzqr5x8dPV0