I'm from Hong Kong and I think it's unfair to compare the US with us. Hong Kong's just a city in China. If anything, compare with New York, say...
... or compare US with China. I know which one I prefer :D
... or compare US with China. I know which one I prefer :D
Last I checked, NYC has nothing even resembling 1GBps speeds, not unless you're willing to pay for an OC12 line, which I think is in the US$100,000-200,000 per month.
I think that was his point: NYC has the same population density as HK (higher, actually, by close to 10%) but you'd be hard pressed finding an ISP offering 1Gbps for $30.
300kb/s download, 1Mb/s up. That's international. I guess the firewall slows it down a bit.
No real shaping or anything, just certain sites are unreachable.
Cost is quite competitive. About $7/month. Only problem was setting up a router, this province uses some weird username-scrambling dialer software (windows only, of course), and my real username (sniffed via Wireshark) happened to get a new-line+char-return scrambled into it. I had to brush up on XML, then hand-edit a router config file. Did you know that XML has really stupid new-line/char-return handling? Anyhow ... it's better than Australia (on the sites you can reach), and the ISP service is only a little worse.
Big cities can get 20Mb/s, at ~$50 a month, but that's a premium plan.