Resuming normal programming…and China facts
Probably the longest posting hiatus since I started this thing. A few reasons including moving to our brand new office and the inevitable last minute spring clean / after-work packing that goes with that. And I wasn’t able to catch up this past (long bank holiday) weekend as I was in Sologne where needless to say there wasn’t a broadband connection. (To be fair I’m not sure I would have logged on as the whole point was to be out walking in the woods and enjoying the food and the wine…) But on the train there I was reading the Economist’s special report on China and the internet, and was fascinated by some of the statistics:
The numbers of internet-connected computers have more than doubled since the end of 2002, to 45.6m, and internet-users have risen by 75%, to 111m. China now has more internet-users than any country but America, and over half of them have broadband (up from 6.6% at the end of 2002). Users of instant computer-to-computer messaging systems have more than doubled, to 87m. Blogs—online personal diaries, scarcely heard of three years ago—now number more than 30m. And search engines receive over 360m requests a day.
The spread of mobile telephony has been no less spectacular. At the end of last year China had 393m mobile-phone accounts, nearly 200m more than at the end of 2002 and more than any other country. If, as many believe, China’s first third-generation mobile-network licence is to be awarded in the coming year, internet access at broadband speeds will become available on mobile handsets. And, crucially, many people in towns can now afford all this technology. China’s economy in the past three years has been growing at around 10% a year, enriching a growing middle class that increasingly sees the internet as an aid to information-gathering, communication and entertainment. Even many students can afford laptops. In big cities, they congregate in cafés that offer free wireless access.
Moreover, the technological transformation is spreading far into the hinterland. Almost every county now has broadband. Internet cafés with high-speed connections are ubiquitous and cheap even in remote towns. Fixed-line internet access is still uncommon in rural homes. But in many parts of the countryside, it is possible to surf the internet at landline modem speeds using a mobile handset (though few peasants can afford to). With the government’s encouragement, state-owned companies have poured quantities of money into the building of a telecoms infrastructure worthy of the rich world.
And so here I was, reading that there was a reasonably likelyhood that at a similar rural retreat halfway around the world in China, my ability to connect to the network would be as high if not higher than in France, one of the leading and richest economies in the world. Wow.
I know ‘China’ is not a new story. Indeed many think the hype far exceeds the reality. Still I’m not sure how anyone can look at these numbers and not say ‘wow’. 100+ million internet users. 400 million mobile phones.
Imagine 200 million Chinese farmers trading and hedging their inputs and outputs every week with a few clicks on a 3G phone… a real living smart sensor network on a vast scale. Markets meet the flat world. (A bit cheeky but I’m smiling about having somehow managed to work in that last link to Tara Hunt’s great contribution to the Friedman Flat World conversation.
