Internet Access in Mainland China for Business and Leisure

Internet access in China

It was difficult getting internet access in China a mere 6 years ago. Corporate leased line were difficult to apply for, hotels had no internet access, dial-ups were extremely unreliable, xDSL or cable were largely unavailable and cybercafes largely denied foreigners access.

Today, China is one of the easiest country in the Asia to make internet accessible to businesses, homes, travellers and students.

If you are a business traveller or tourist, you will be pleasantly surprised that almost all hotels, down to 3 stars hotels, even in more remote cities offer broadband internet access in their hotel rooms. Most rooms will have an ethernet port for you to hook up to the hotel's broadband. Access is mostly automatically DHCP with dynamic IPs but in certain hotels, you may need to call the reception to allow access from your room.

You can also visit a cybercafe or 'wang ba' as they are known in China. Cybercafes are everywhere in China and can be a dingy 5 computer setup to large cybercafes with hundreds and hundreds of computers. Most cybercafes in China are patronized by young people whose sole purpose are computer games or online-chatting. These youngsters can spend days in the cybercafes without going home. If you find them too noisy for your liking, you can even request for a private VIP room to surf in peace and comfort!

As a foreigner, you will need to show your passport before you can be allowed access to a cybercafe. In many provinces, the local law requires your picture to be taken and your particulars submitted to a central database. The cybercafes are pretty strict about this or they are liable to have their operating licences taken away. Cybercafes are lucrative businesses in China and you can be sure that they implement the required laws most strictly!

One of the problem that you may face in a public cybercafe is that all the log-in procedures and computer operating systems will only be in Chinese even in the touristy areas. Hence, you will need the cybercafe operator assistance before you can eventually start answering all your Hotmails and Gmails.

If you like visiting coffee cafes, you will also find that many of the newer cafes offer internet points for you to plug in your laptop. Most of the time, usage is free. At this point of time, wireless internet access does not seem to be entirely popular as compared to wire access in these cafes.

If you are running a business, getting a corporate lease line or xDSL broadband is a breeze with very competitive ISP fighting for your business. Monthly charges are low and access speed is decent. In fact, many newer office buildings offer broadband access as part of the rental deal and you need not apply seperately to the ISP.

Home users are well taken care of as well. Many new apartment also comes with broadband access or you can apply to the ISPs directly. Charges for monthly sDSL broadband can be as low as US12.

Control of the internet

China is one of the countries with strict internet laws. Having said that, internet usage in China is very, very high for both business and social use. Because personal computers are still expensive by China's income standard, most people access the internet from cybercafes or from offices.

All websites hosted in China needs to be a approved by a government unit. One of the first thing you will notice in China is that domestic sites are blazingly fast but foreign hosted sites tend to be very slow. This is due to foreign sites having to go through a proxy as well as a bottleneck on China's limited conduit out to the international internet pipes.

Many foreign sites such as CNN, Falungong, Playboy and other sites deem sensitive to China's society are blocked.

Web applications and development in China are often of a high standard. Many domestic sites such as Alibaba and Sohu has made it to the very competitive top internet arenas. Many web development companies from Taiwan, South Korea and even the USA has also made China their development base for their web applications as China offers a large pool of competitive and high qualified web developers.

Ken Cheong worked, lived and travelled in China for the last 7 years. Please feel free to email him. You may distribute this article as long as mention is made of http://www.chinese-culture.net and http://www.quick-pain-relief.com

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How to Choose Best ISP for Your Needs

Well, the Internet access industry is starting to shake its way out. The much-anticipated consolidation of access providers is nearing its end. In broadband, this means that most users have little or no choice of providers. Though many of the changes have been hard on user choice, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In some cases, it's better to have one stable and pricey provider than 100 unstable, cheap providers. The shakeout was painful for scores of users who often were left with no connection when they needed it most. And some providers left standing don't exactly have good track records, either.

Still, there is reason for users to be optimistic about the future. The following is an outline of the way the Internet access business should go in the coming year. I provide it to give you a better understanding of where you should go now, assuming you want to stick with the same internet access provider for at least a year.

Don't ditch dial-up

A lot of users were glad they hung on to their dial-up accounts in the midst of uncertainty with their broadband connections. When things go bad with broadband (as they often do), you at least can get e-mail, if not a quick scan of the headlines in text-heavy Web sites.

If you have a dial-up account, and you're paying less than $20 for it, consider it a blessing to have a back-up system. At the very least, when you need to reach tech support for your broadband account and you can't get through due to heavy call volume, you can e-mail them from your dial-up account. Things to look out for in dial-up:

Go with a provider that has been around long enough to quickly respond to such issues as software upgrades and peak calling volumes.

Read the fine print before signing. Some ISPs will disconnect you after a relatively short amount of time of idleness. Others let you stay online as long as you're actively engaged. Still others never disconnect users. The last is preferable; the middle option usually offers the best value.

Check out Boardwatch magazine's ISP Directory to see how much infrastructure you will be paying for. Make sure your chosen ISP has an acceptable ratio of modems to users. Three users for every modem is acceptable, considering that it is unlikely that all their customers will dial up at once. o Match prices with the ratio of modem pools to users.

Check out options such as personal Web site services and multiple addresses. These are nice to have and can add value to your experience as long as you use them--provided they're bundled in.

DSL doldrums

Of all the access methods, DSL has received the most scorn since I've been at this job. My own experiences were horrendous, and I'm not alone. It works great for about 20 percent of the population who are geographically blessed. It works OK for another 30 percent or so of the population, who may have to endure some line noise in order to get DSL. And it doesn't work at all for the other half. Couple its inherent technical limitations with DSL providers falling off the wires like shocked birds, and the situation has not been pretty.

Still, those providers that have made it through the shock test should be able to offer a good experience (with the exception of Qwest). Consider DSL carefully and you will avoid a lot of pain.

Some DSL issues you should consider:

Talk to a neighbor about their DSL experience. Do they have a lot of line noise on the phone even with the filters? Did they have any equipment or network problems with their provider? If so, did they get put on hold and shuffled around through tech support when they called in? Was their DSL provider able to support a variety of platforms, or was it basically Windows-only?

Consider an ISP for DSL service.

The Baby Bells, such as Qwest and Verizon, are not well equipped to deliver DSL service. Even though smaller ISPs may only resell DSL service from Baby Bell providers, they at least provide a live human being when things go wrong. Because the Baby Bells know the cost of supporting DSL users, they can offer DSL to ISPs much more cheaply than they can offer it directly to users. So you can often get a price break from ISPs, especially if you're willing to accept a slightly slower connection.

Mary works in US for a media company, occasionally writing for the biggest cheap internet access news portal, and drinking too much coffee.

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