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How fast is China's Internet?
The Internet speed ranks 91st in the world, according to a China Daily webpage published this June, which was also mentioned in a New York Times report.
But on August 8, a report on cable.co.uk, which is owned by a British media company, Existent Ltd. said China's Internet speed ranked 134th.
How can a country's Internet speed rank drop 43 positions in just two months?
Behind the numbers
We tried to investigate the reason behind the two conflicting reports with data provided by the Chinese government, which just published a report about China's Internet industry.
The CAICT, or China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, is now holding a forum about China's Internet development in Beijing.
The forum published a paper titled "Trend of China's Internet industry development" (You can see the PDF file here, but only in Chinese), in which it said the country's average cable network speed is 13Mb/s.
The average speed of Internet connections in China.
It means you can watch four 1080p YouTube live streams simultaneously since YouTube says one 1080p stream takes 3Mbit/s.
Now let's compare this number with the two reports we mentioned above.
The China Daily report said the speed in 2016 was 9.46Mb/s while the UK company said the speed in May 2017 was only 1.55Mb/s.
No wonder China's rank on the UK company list was so low.
Let's talk more about the UK ranking. The data used to generate the list was from M-Lab, whose test is only available in English, not Chinese.
The sample size for the US was nine million while for China it's only 50 thousand. It captured only 0.00004 percent of the country's 1.379 billion population.
These samples are barely a few Chinese people who happened to use a service in their second or third language to test Internet speed.
Is the test result from M-Lab really reliable?
Put it to the test
We at CGTN Beijing HQ tried the M-Lab test and got a result much slower than the speed we see everyday on our web browser.
The M-Lab test says our download speed is 2.19Mb/s on August 24, 2017.
YouTube realtime statistics says our download speed is about 3.8Mb/s when we watch a CGTN video on August 24, 2017.
For this single test, the M-Lab result was far from a real-life scenario.
And that's the speed when we connect to a server outside China.
When we tried to download a WeChat Messenger from Tencent's doc server, the speed was 1.12MB/s.
Note the capitalized B in the measure. One MB (megabyte) equals eight Mb (megabits), which is a fact for all computers worldwide.
That means the speed was actually 8.96Mb/s, which should rank China 51st in the UK company list. It should have also put China five ranks above Australia, and five ranks below Italy.
Upgrade to fibers
The good old bronze network cable is getting replaced by optical fibers in China, as 81 percent of the 740 million broadband connections in the country is connected through optical fiber.
This portion is now larger than that of Japan and even South Korea, making the number largest in the whole world.
A portion of different connection methods in China, with the percentage of connections faster than 20Mb/s.
The optical fiber infrastructure has opened the path to Internet speed upgrades in the future.
"Basically all prefecture-level cities have already become optical cities, with full fiber coverage and maximum connection speed of more than 100Mb/s," the CAICT report said.
The old xDSL technology, which used to be the most preferred connection method in 2007 is now facing extinction in China.
However, only 50 percent of the users in 2007 preferred xDSL. Now, only 0.2 percent use this technology.
Faster but cheaper
A more shocking data released in the CAICT report is the cost of Internet usage.
An average Chinese Internet user pays 45.4 yuan (less than 7 US dollars) a month to get unlimited cable data at the speed mentioned above.
For mobile data, the price is now 31 yuan (about 4.7 US dollars) for one GB (gigabyte), only one tenth of the number in 2011.
Average per-GB price of mobile data in China.
But CAICT admitted price will fall further, as China now ranks 89th on the cable price list, and 53rd on the mobile one.
China's Internet is evolving fast. Bike-sharing and mobile payment were almost nonexistent in 2015 but now it's used by most residents in urban areas.
So, if you are still looking at last year's statistics, you may have missed the trend.
(CGTN)
