
China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes - wamatt
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2013-01/09/content_16099801.htm
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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..

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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.

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loceng
Pretty sure you could make this a legal requirement even in a democracy.

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anigbrowl
Not without people screaming about the danger of government meddling in
industrial policy and wrangling over it for the better part of a decade.

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gizmo686
That's capitalist democracy. You could have a democracy where the government
does control (or has significant influence over) industry.

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loceng
And not allow the government to be the scapegoat for corporate-driven changes
and rules.

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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).

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davorb
Doesn't this just make homes unnecessarily more expensive?

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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.

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dmix
I'm with the original commentor. The first question we should ask if not "does
this provide value to the individuals in a specific group?" but what are the
unintended consequences for everyone in the economy?

This is explored very well in the book "Economics in One Lesson":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson>

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richardjordan
Questions we ask are not going to influence policy in China which runs by a
different set of rules.

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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.

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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?

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

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w1ntermute
What speed does this actually mean? 100/100?

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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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps

That doesn't seem that fast to me. I get better speeds out in the Midwest in
America, where internet is supposed to be super shitty.

Particularly, I was expecting a symmetric connection.

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seanmcdirmid
This is actually pretty good for inside the GFW; keep in mind links are
typically overloaded to the resource you are accessing, its not just about
your final leg speed. So fiber really only fixes one part of the connection,
Amdahl's law still applies.

Oddly enough, I actually sometimes find sites outside the GFW are a bit faster
compared to some domestic Chinese sites inside the GFW. The internal Chinese
internet just has lots of problems that they haven't worked through yet.

~~~
w1ntermute
> keep in mind links are typically overloaded to the resource you are
> accessing, its not just about your final leg speed. So fiber really only
> fixes one part of the connection, Amdahl's law still applies.

Is the last mile not the bottleneck in China? It is in America, AFAIK.

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seanmcdirmid
Not when you are watching "Gangnam Style" on Youku. Anything video will be
blocked in America anyways, so its Chinese sites only for that. It is true
that I can't really do Apple to Apple comparisons.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Not when you are watching "Gangnam Style" on Youku.

Why is this? Do the ISPs not have caching systems in place?

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seanmcdirmid
For streamed video? I don't even think that is possible. But please correct me
if I'm wrong.

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w1ntermute
Of course it's possible: [http://netequalizernews.com/2010/10/26/enhance-your-
isp-offe...](http://netequalizernews.com/2010/10/26/enhance-your-isp-offering-
with-youtube-caching/)

 _> To ensure better performance, my Internet provider keeps a local copy of
the popular YouTube content (caching), and when I watch a trending video, they
send me the stream from their local cache. However, if I request a video
that’s not contained in their current cache, I’m sent over the broader
Internet to the actual YouTube content servers._

I have no doubt that the vast majority of American ISPs have cached Gangnam
Style. In the US at least, Google/YouTube likely assists in this process.

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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...

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

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jzwinck
By adding more cables?

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gbog
One fiber can carry many more lines than one thread of copper, right?

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

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Hello71
Fiber is cheap. Hiring Americans to pull it through the ground (/tunnels/on
power lines/whathaveyou) is not.

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franzwong
Unfortunately, China is not ruled by law.

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hhuio
We need to do that here as well!

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

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president
More bandwidth for all that spying

