China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes | Hacker News Reader

China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes

usa.chinadaily.com.cn

112 pointswamatt69 comments

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..

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

In the US maybe, but I could easily see something like this happening in Scandinavia. Sweden already has a lot of provider-neutral municipal fiber.

Pretty sure Australia has done just that. State owned central ISP (NBN: National Broadband Network).

I hope China goes the way of South Korea and Taiwan. A transition to democracy once the economy's improved enough. The only problem is that its size means that China can't take the export oriented path to growth at the same rate that SK/Taiwan did.

On the other hand, China has a lot of investment to do in its western part of the country.

Yeah, that's my point. China can't modernize so quickly because it has a large hinterland that SK and Taiwan don't.

If China is a dictatorship, then who is the dictator? It rather seems to be run by the inner Party leaders.

Its more like an Aristocracy these days (as it was pretty much before since before Qin). Certain powerful families control about 90% of the government and 40% of the economy. Otherwise, the government is completely opaque, and its hard to tell who is really in charge and what relationships (guanxi) connect them together.

From what I've read, the national government is a lot more consistent and essentially "good" than some of the local government leaders, which is kind of the opposite of the US.

(I'd still far prefer the US to China, and don't think either the US or China are perfect, but most China's regional governments seem to be really bad even in comparison to the national government.)

No not really, but the national government wants you to think so. The local (less powerful) officials have always been convenient fall guys for national problems, as in "we are good, but our hand chosen underlings are the bad guys." The problems are pervasive up and down.

You'll find that a city like Shanghai or even Kunming are much better governed than the capital of Beijing due to strong local governments and less national government interference.

Shanghai is an exception, as are the SEZes. Shanghai almost seems like another country -- it's not as uncorrupt as HK, but is pretty similar to a place like Thailand, from what I saw of it (I know some people who have businesses there, and have spent about a year in total between HK, Shanghai, and Thailand, although I only did business myself in HK)

You should try reading stuff written by Tibetans :-) More seriously though after going through various debates both with Chinese nationals and Chinese ex-patriots the only conclusion I can rely on is that its "complicated" and just as someone from the #Occupy movement might write a very different description of the benevolence of our government than someone in the 1%, points of view are greatly affected by their origin.

Yeah, I'm not really including Tibet. I see that as a geo-strategic thing vs. India, and Tibet wasn't exactly a progressive wonderful state before the Chinese, either.

However, in Western China, non-Han seem to be treated better by the national government than by regional or local. Although the weird "Uighurs in Guantanamo" thing was just totally surreal (we essentially bribed China into supporting us in the Iraq war by letting them classify muslim semi-separatists as global jihadis, and thus cooperating with the Chinese government in detaining them)

Tibet was as provincial as the rest of china was before the communists, no doubt. The only reason the Han are hated so now is that the gov is so god-damned paternal about it to the Uighurs and Tibetans, that and a Han manifest destiny.

Hu Jintao was in charge of Tibet during the troubles of 1989, his protege was then in charge of Tibet and took a harder line (confiscating Dalai Lama pictures), and then got promoted to xinjiang where he promptly started a get tough on islam campaign.

Tell me how the national government isn't involved again?

That's not "corruption", though.

No, just normal douche baggery :)

Source(s)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China is a start http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/fighting_corruption...

There have been a fair number of executions of local government officials.

It's much easier to make the case "corruption at the local level is really bad" vs. "the central government isn't corrupt" -- I'm just saying the local people are worse than the central government in a lot of ways.

The least corrupt entity is the PLA, which has the most power at the national level.

The most corrupt things are land sales, which are handled at the local level.

Uhm... That is what is happening in Japan. But Not in China.

Sounds very wumao!

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.

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.

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?

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

I fail at being amazed over a government mandating things.

And what makes you think this happened in the absence of lobbying? For all we know, this could have come after one of the CEOs of China's ISPs invited the right officials out for dinner.

I get a bit scared when I see people who seem to view this as progress.

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).

Doesn't this just make homes unnecessarily more expensive?

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

What speed does this actually mean? 100/100?

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.

> 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.

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.

Correct. I added the day and time for reference, in the evenings during the week, the internet speed can be rated as "lol" in both directions.

w1ntermute, I'm fully aware those speeds are most definitely not fast, but relatively speaking it's usually worse than that.

(I love going to South Korea, I land at Incheon, there's free WiFi in the coach to the city, and the internet is FAST)

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

Of course it's possible: http://netequalizernews.com/2010/10/26/enhance-your-isp-offe...

> 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.

True, that is quite good inside the GFW. As a comparison, I am in Beijing in an apartment from 2002, with a DSL connection that China Unicom sells as 4Mbps (the best I could buy here):

Beijing ping - 26ms down - 2.53Mbps up - 0.53Mbps

Shanghai ping - 148ms down - .83Mbps up - .52Mbps

London ping - 410ms down - .19Mbps up - .15Mbps

Try San Francisco. From Beijing there is usually a good connection to the west coast, better than to Europe.

Thanks, Sean. I was using London so my results would be comparable to the parent's.

It depends how much you pay. I'm in a city 180km from Shanghai and switched to optical fiber recently with no extra charge. I have a plan of 7Mpbs including TV and internet with price of around 200 dollars equivalent per year. They have 20Mpbs plan but the price is different. The internet connection is still 4Mbps as I tested. The TV is much better than before. In Canada I use cable service, with the same speed I pay 50 dollars per month.

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.

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

Tell that to New Zealand then, we're in the process of doing (what appears like a bit of a mess of) a fibre rollout here. All the plans are 30/10 with the "premium ones" being 100/50.

That's the internet plan, not the physicality of the link; I have an (absolutely awesome for the US, still shit in my opinion) 35/10 plan from Frontier in the suburbs of Seattle, but the physical link is 100M, they throttle it at the switch.

In the UK most fibre is to the street with ADSL over copy for the last bit. I get 40/20 from that. I presume the street gets gigabit.

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...

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

By adding more cables?

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

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

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

Fiber costs very little already.

Unfortunately, China is not ruled by law.

We need to do that here as well!

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

More bandwidth for all that spying

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