China’s average peak Internet speed reached 737.4KB/S in 2013, up 14% as compared with the beginning of the same year, according to a broadband speed overview released by Xunlei.
The peak Internet speed for Hongkong, Macau and Taiwan still take the leads as compared with that for other regions in Chinese mainland. The connection speed of Shanghai and Beijing reached 1,190.3KB/s and 970.2KB/s, respectively. The development of broadband infrastructure is quite uneven, while peak Internet speed of Xining, a city in underdevelopped northwestern China, is only half of that for Shanghai.
2013 Peak Internet Speed of Chinese Provincial-level Regions (Data source: Xunlei)
China Telecom and China Unicom, two national broadband operators, account for 90% of the market share on aggregate, but their peak Internet speed is respectively 725.6KB/s and 723.9KB/s, lagging behind regional operators led by Greatwall Broadband Network (1,296.1 KB/s).
Peak Internet Speed of Operators (Data source: Xunlei)
From regional perspective, there’s little difference between the Internet speed of the North and the South. However, the Internet speed for eastern, middle and western regions shows a descending trend. This trend is highly correlated with the economic development levels of these three areas.
Big data download capacity is becoming the rigid demand of users. China’s average download per capital per time reached 113MB, with 16 provincial-level regions exceeded 100MB and five areas surpassed 200 MB. Shanxi Province topped the chart with 651MB.
In order to accelerate broadband construction in China, the central government released “Broadband China” strategic plan last August, targeting to realize full broadband network coverage by 2020. China also planned to construct seven backbone network nodes in addition to three existing ones in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
image credit: Shutterstock
I’d be interested in learning about high the reliability of Internet connections has changed…or will change. For me, the speed isn’t usually the problem. The problem is that it’s so unreliable…sometimes dropping for minutes, sometimes slow for hours, etc.