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I'd also emphasize the unlikelihood that China can handle that amount of traffic.

As anyone who's surfed on the internet in China can attest, the bandwidth into and out of China is basically nil. You can test this out yourself by trying to watch anything on youku.com - it takes years to load. If they magically had the capacity to actually handle the load of the world, I wish they would turn it on already.

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The fact that the internet service for regular users is terrible does not mean that China does not have the capacity to make it otherwise. My impression of China's relationship with the internet is that they would prefer if their citizens stayed off it. Maybe the crap service for the average person is intentional?

If you're running a large chinese business with billions of dollars of dealings I bet they sort you out a decent pipe.

Re both of you:

Yeah, it could be by design, and yes a number of corporations have direct fiber lines out to Japan. I used to work at Microsoft in Beijing, which had a line out to Japan and it was easily the fastest internet I've ever use in my life (goes without saying also uncensored).

From my understanding, one of the main reasons that internet is so slow in China is because everything has to pass through the Great Fire Wall.

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