It seems individual experiences with the internet after the Taiwan earthquake, which damaged undersea fiber optic cables, differ wildly. That is just how the internet and computers are, don't you think? It is hard to give an evaluation of the internet for anything so broad as a country, much less a big one like China, and really it comes down to so many unknowns: city connections, users online, server locations, personal comptuer speed, and who knows what else.
I just read a weblog entry on CNET Asia from another foreigner living in China lamenting the loss of internet speed and usability after the earthquake. The difference is that his and my experiences seem to differ quite a bit. The services I praised in a previous entry about the state of the internet in post-cable-damaged China are the exact ones he said were doing poorly.
The most different experience I found in William Moss's article related to Gmail. I had previously stated that Gmail saved me, being the only mail server that remained accessible, even immediately after the quake when even simple text web pages based in the Americas would take hours to load. For him, "Gmail has been almost useless."
We also differed on Skype experience. He is right in that Skype fared better than many sites because (he and I similarly speculate) they are mainly based in Europe and not in the United States. However, most folks I know who have tried to Skype from Asia to the West have only just, in the past week or so, begun to have successful calls. Even Asia to Asia has been rough, which is strange, unless those messages have to go to Europe and back. Plus, I have found typed messages through Skype to be very irregular: a conversation will be going well for a few minutes, then all the sudden my messages cannot be delievered...only to finally reach their destination a week later (really!).
I do not doubt William's comment, though. Such things are common place in the internet world. I just find it funny that the experience of two guys in the same country could be so different.
He does comment at the end of the article the same thing I am saying here: "...the service interruption caused by the cables is inconsistent. It varies from city to city, ISP to ISP, and hour to hour." No kidding.
Our service out here in Southwest China has returned to a "usable" state. I would not call it normal by any means, but at least it seems to degrade each day by a farily predictable schedule. I have noticed that the internet (and I mainly use sites based in the Americas) seems to run counter to the American schedule. When the United States is up and running, everything is poor here, but once they go to sleep, our internet speed improves. Now, that is just me, being highly dependent on e-mail and internet servers based in the Americas.
William Moss's addition on the end of his article suggested that Guangzhou has better connections than Shanghai and Beijing. Maybe—and only just maybe, because the people who really know the answers to these questions would have to kill you if they told you—with Hong Kong as a major hub in the Pacific area for those cables (at least, going from the maps I have seen) Guangzhou does have a better connection, and thus, we might too, because Guangxi is just next door to Guangdong Province. Maybe Shanghai and Beijing are running off the lower bandwidth options that connected mainly through Shanghai.
In one area, William Moss and I are in complete agreement: "Every update [on when the cables will be fixed] says more or less the same thing: another two weeks." Right on! The Taiwan and Hong Kong news sources seem to be a bit more realistic in their reports, citing delays due to bad weather. They suggest the fixes could be made by the end of January, again, only if weather permits.
