FCC approves much-needed increased China-U.S. bandwidth

As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.

The score right now: 5,547 to 2,726. That's the current Atlantic vs. Pacific bandwidth score in gigabits per second, according to TeleGeography. The Trans-Pacific Express "will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second, and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce," writes ChinaTechNews.

Construction has been under way since September, and should be complete before the Olympics. Internet speeds in Beijing are generally pretty good in my experience, but further south in Shanghai, much of the transpacific traffic is terribly sluggish on a variety of connections. Perhaps this is a matter of higher demand there, but with the FCC's approval for the cable to land in Oregon, things should get better soon.

[jumpjetta]

Great. Now we can get twice as much spam twice as fast.

[cidman2001]

That's what we need...an opportunity to have the trade imbalance with China grow at an even faster rate! I'm impressed that we are so concerned about internet speeds in China when we don't have adequate broadband or wireless in many parts of the country. Boneheads!

[joestellar]

I"m an American working in southern China. The internet speeds here are insanely slow. This upgrade is badly needed. FYI, the Chinese have no interest in spam. They are into manufactering, they are not big into marketing, sales, or advertising. They would have no bennifit to spam. As far as the imbalance goes. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of people here. The inbalance is because we are outnumbered. They are willing to work hard for very little money, most Americans I know keep demanding more money all the time. In a global economy the lowest bidder wins.

[Elidine]

and in the world of the blind, the 1 eyed man is king.

whatever that means

[thenet411]

joestellar: The Chinese have EVERY interest in SPAM. They make tons of money sending crap to U.S. inboxes because China is a haven for the scum that are SPAMMERs. Wake up.

[billstewart]

There are two kinds of networks from China to the rest of the world - private internal networks run by corporations, and the public Internet, which is required to go through China's censorship firewall. The general experience of my customers in China has been that the performance problems are at the firewall, whether it's the firewall servers themselves or the amount of bandwidth the telco dual-monopoly buys to connect the outside of the firewall to the rest of the net. This new cable will make more bandwidth available for both kinds of networks to buy, and will probably reduce the price per megabit they can pay for it, but the Internet performance won't improve until they actually buy enough to get ahead of demand.

As far as spam goes, the US doesn't receive much spam email from China, and it's easy to identify China-based IP addresses and just filter them out at your mail server. Spammers mostly send the mail from your neighbor's cable modem and insecure PC instead. Where China fits in the spam business is that it hosts the websites that spammer's customers go to if they decide they want to actually buy the Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra pills that the spam email said they needed. It makes a lot of cash for the scammers who run it, and the government doesn't care what they're selling to foreigners or shut their websites down, and it also balances traffic loads by sending out lots of bytes out to make up for the incoming bytes that Chinese web surfers are downloading when they look at US web sites.