On October 23rd, 65438/kloc-0, American Fortune magazine quoted Akamai, a network traffic company, as saying that South Korea ranked first with 14M bps, which was more than seven times faster than the global average speed of 1.9Mbps, followed by China (9.2Mbps) and Japan (8.5Mbps).
What about China? According to the 27th Statistical Report on China's Internet Development in June 5438+091October this year, by the end of February 20 10, the average Internet connection speed in China was 100.9KB/s, which was 0.8 1M bps, far below the global level. Although the Internet speed in China is so slow, the number of Internet users in China has reached 457 million, an increase of 73.3 million compared with the end of 2009. How much did such a huge netizen in China pay for the slow internet speed?
Why is the Internet speed in Korea so fast? The Internet revolution in South Korea began with HANARO communication in 1999. Because the state-owned enterprise Korea Communication firmly grasps the fixed telephone market and ISDN monopoly network access, although both the Korean government and competitor Korea Communication think that ADSL technology is immature and cannot be commercialized, HANARO first launched ADSL in the world in April of 1999 with a speed as high as 1M bps. It was far ahead of the ISDN access speed of Korea Communication at that time, which was 128 kbps. Later, HANARO introduced a low price policy of 28,000 won (equivalent to RMB 170 yuan) per month, which caused a sensation all over Korea, prompting Korea Communications to abandon ISDN and launch ADSL services. Since then, South Korea's Internet revolution has opened a real curtain and provided a cornerstone for South Korea to enter an IT power.
In recent ten years, the speed of Internet access in Korea has been accelerating, and 100M bps has become the standard for ordinary families. Although the speed is 0/00 times of the previous/kloc-0, the monthly price is close to the original price, that is, 27,500 won (equivalent to RMB 167 yuan). At the end of June this year, the Korea Broadcasting and Communication Commission released the future Internet development plan, which proposed to increase the Internet access speed to 1 Gbps by 2065 based on the standards of 2065 100 Mbps and 438+02 10 Gbps, that is, the United States.
Compared with the competition in Korean telecom industry, in my opinion, the biggest reason for the slow network speed in China is the lack of effective competition. China's Internet access market is still almost divided by China Telecom and China Unicom, which enjoy regional monopoly advantages in the south and north respectively, while China's broadband industry is still in an administrative monopoly situation in essence.
Another reason is that the executives of China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom often transfer to each other. For example, in 2004, Wang Xiaochu, deputy general manager of China Mobile, was transferred to China Telecom to take over as general manager; Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China Unicom, was transferred to China Mobile to take over as general manager; Deputy general manager of China Telecom often goes to China Unicom to take over as chairman; Leng Rongquan, deputy general manager of China Netcom, was transferred to China Telecom to replace Chang. Recently, there are rumors that the chairman of China Unicom will often return to China Telecom as the chairman. In the case of mutual transfer of executives of state-owned communication operators, executives seem to have no motivation to break the oligopoly. Professor Dan Breznitz of Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, in the recently published book Run of the Red Q ueen, also demonstrated this point: in the case that executives may be transferred to competitors in the future, it is difficult to form an incentive to invest huge sums of money to make current enterprises have a dominant market position. If the departments concerned have successfully curbed the vicious competition among enterprises, another result will not be conducive to the development of Internet in China. Due to the lack of effective competition, the Internet speed in China is still at an unsatisfactory low level.
We can also roughly calculate the cost of network traffic jams. By the end of 20 10, the number of netizens in China had reached 457 million, and the average online time of netizens in China was 18.3 hours per week and 2.6 hours per day. Assuming that the current Internet speed in China is not100.9 KB/s, but close to the global average connection speed of 230.4 KB/s, it is conservatively estimated that each netizen can save 15 minutes every day. So what is the value of 15 minutes? The hourly minimum wage in many places in China exceeds that in 9 yuan. According to 8 yuan's conservative calculation, then 15 minutes is 2 yuan. Due to the huge number of netizens in China, 457 million people are multiplied by 2 yuan times 365 days, which is 333.6 billion yuan a year. 333.6 billion yuan is 1.5 times of the total investment of newly started Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway of 220.9 billion yuan. In other words, the annual traffic jam cost in China is the same as that in Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail construction, and this is only a conservative estimate.