Digital_Boy
@sbc.com
| Re: Wow ??? Ah, pardon me, but your blatant display of ignorance was too much to ignore.
China did *NOT* do anything to Hong Kong until the British returned it to them in 1997. Prior to that, Hong Kong was (and still is) one of the most thriving havens of laissez-fair capitalism. As such, there's money to be spent, and businesses that are willing to spend it to future proof themselves. Beijing has been keeping the party's fingers out of HK's pie because they don't want to kill it's economic viability. They've been keeping their PSTN, cellular and data networks up to snuff for the last 20-30 years, so there is plent of fiber in the ground there that has been there for years. The majority of mainland China has almost no copper or fiber in the ground at all. This is why China is going for cellular technology in a big way, since it'd be prohibitively expensive for them to bury fiber to cover all of China.
This gigabit service is offered in Hong Kong only, and only in those buildings where it's wired (I'm guessing in high density urban housing, since that's where the majority of their customer base is) only. I defy you to show me an example of some private citizen outside of HK getting gigabit speeds for $215 a month to their home, say in Shanghai, or any other province of China.
30 years ago, the internet didn't exist outside of ARPANET and a few mainframes at large universities. There weren't cheap, powerful PC's in 80 to 90 percent of American households to fuel the demand for bandwidth like there is now. And all the fiber first laid at the onset of the upgrade to an entirely digital communications network was multimode fiber at first, since that was the limits of the technology in the early 70's. Now single mode fiber is the rule, since it has much better loss characteristics and ultimate bandwidth capacity. |
