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by Peter Dzwig
Probably about 25 years ago I wrote a report for a client who was thinking of opening up shop in Russia. Part of the core of that report was that not every society has the same (market) traditions and cuture as those in the West. That may or may not seem obvious. The client wanted to enter the Russian (at that time recently-Soviet) market with an American-style market proposition. My view was – and still remains – that the market wouldn't necessarily adopt the western model rapidly, if at all. We are all aware that the Russian "model of capitalism" is very different from the western one, let alone the US version. Still more so the current Chinese version of capitalism "with a Socialist face", we have no idea when, if ever, it will become like the western version. In fact all the evidence is that the two are actually diverging.
So it perhaps should not surprise us that the Chinese model of the Internet is also so different from ours. China is a 3,000 year-old civilisation with a long tradition of insularity, of which the current China is merely the present manifestation. For a long part of that time it has looked down on the outside world and in effect closed its doors against the outside world. Therefore I was fascinated by an article in the FT) of 20th Jan about the so-called "Chinese Firewall". It didn't come as a great surprise that Google and the Chinese aurthorities should have had a run-in, one was surely inevitable if not necessarily imminent. There is a fundamental tension betweeen the Chinese way of doing things and the western way of doing things.
Here I am specific in my use of the term "western" as countries such as Japan and Korea, as well as a number of South-East Asian countries, sit along a spectrum between the western model of the Internet and the Chinese. The fact that China has a much bigger population than any other country and is "opening up", is seen by many in the West as a huge potential market for their companies. To the Chinese it probably appears as a wholly different proposition. It is not clear that the model that the perspective that the Chinese adopt is anything like the rest of the world's. After all their population is about three times that of the EU and bigger still than the US, they have a huge market for their own technology and do not have to be behoven to the outside world. So perhaps we are wrong to be surprised at western perceptions of China's attitude towards such as Google (and they aren't the only ones). I am not referring to alleged attempts to hack dissident's Googlemail accounts, but to the overall marked divergence in attitudes between China and Google going back to the point at which Google entered China.
More immediately salient is that, as the FT article shows, the Chinese usage profile of the Internet is different from that in the West. Certainly there are areas that are very different because of the sensitivities of the Chinese government to social networking sites; but what struck me was figures from McKinsey quoted in the FT article about the general profile. The next part is broadly a summary of those, for which I take no credit. A Chinese person is likely to make (all figures I am going to give are rough) 2/3rds as much usage again of the net for email and searching for information as a European counterpart; a Chinese person makes only one-eighth (!) of the use of the net for work-related purposes as a European counterpart; but 60% more use for gaming; for chatting/instant messaging usage is 235% of European usage; and almost 80% greater for downloading films or music.
A proportion of the diversity of these figures might be laid at the door of lack of social networking sites (email traffic) and Chinese attitudes to intellectual property, in particular copyright (downloading), but not exclusively. The Chinese usage model for the net appears to be one of a gigantic playground. For most net-using westerners with a tradition of research, particularly in Europe, the net is much more of a space within which to find out information as well as to communicate with friends. That is not to say that westerners don't game, download games or chat; but in China the figures are much greater.
I don't actually want to comment too much further on the Chinese model of the Internet except to say that it offers an alternative profile of usage to the typical one that we have adopted in the west. The Internet has become what it has become in the rest of the world because of the model that the rest of the world has adopted, driven by a US-centred model. Is that the only model? Should we not at least consider the alternative ways of using the Internet, and what that might imply? If we look at other usage models then perhaps we could learn for the future and indeed could plan our own networks better. I would be fascinated to see what the comparable figures look like for other emerging economies as they evolve over time. India and Brazil come to mind here. It would also be interesting to see how those evolve over time, what the regional evolution is like and also how it has developed the past.
In France in particular, there is a debate going on at present as to how to deliver much greater bandwidth than they have at present, including to rural populations – and this is in a country where substantially higher rates than the UK has are the norm. The Digital Britain plan to deliver 2 MB/s (max) to the door would be woefully inadequate if we were to look at a model in which there were a lot more gaming, chatting and above all downloading of movies/music and on-line TV. There are two sides to this problem, one is typified by the usage model as above. The other is – and this is why this appears here – that a network's characteristics in terms of bandwidth needs are set by the technologies that are coupled to it. Processor speeds are growing and will go on growing. Multicore means that that is a practical reality, that after all was its rationale. That will increase demand on the ability to download and upload – and not just for the user, but for industry as well. Thus network speeds are a factor in economic performance; lack of delivery will ultimately be a barrier to economic competitiveness.
The Digital Britain plan is woefullly inadequate, both in respect of technology (bandwidth) and in terms of delivery targets. It is also not going to address the Uk's need to be able to compete. Even were we to adopt a less business and more "Chinese" model of work, where more than raw speed is the issue; quality of line, latency and so on are more important there we would fall short becuase most of the network in the UK is inadequate to deliver to most people. If the target does not change it will do little to reduce "notspots" in relation to average speeds. In fact the concern is that they may even expand. To put some figures to this for a moment, if you look at a href ="http//www.speedtest.net/SpeedTest"> SpeedTest, for example, the UK (by their sampled speeds) ranks 41st globally by download speed and 64th by upload speed. For the "global leader in technologies" that the government aspires to be, these are not good figures. Yesterday (22nd January) BT has announced that it will deliver 40 Mb/s with its service to a limited number of subscribers rolling out this year and "reaching" 4 million by next year. The fact that up to date technology can already deliver well over 50 MB/s in real usage perhaps says more about the ailing state of the UK infrastructure than anything else.