Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

The Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping recently launched the project proposal on a Chinese version of “Google Earth” which is based on an existing program designed and implemented by Chinese scientists called “Geo Globe”. The project will focus on sharing the geographical data in order to blend in commercial and community services.

Google Earth fans would notice that the satellite view of all cities in North America, you can almost see the license plate on each automobile. But the satellite view of the Chinese cities on Google Earth is much fuzzier. To be precise, the image data used in Google Earth for the Chinese cities are only 240 meters / cm and 8000 meters / cm for rural areas. This is because Google fetches the data from commercial companies and there are many limitations and cost considerations.

The Chinese National Survey and Mapping database has high quality and accurate GIS data over China, they have great advantages in producing a more precise “Google Earth – China”. The data obtained by Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping are collected from a variety of geographical mapping methods including both ground-based GPS mapping and aerial mapping.

There are strict laws in each country on the precise scale of GIS data being published for commercial and civilian use. Most countries limit the scale to 30-50 meters / cm. The United States government requires special approval on using any data with a resolution higher than 0.5 m. This is why Google Earth generally use image data with a resolution of 0.6 meters.

I suppose it’s a positive thing for the Chinese government to recognize a higher resolution of satellite image data is appreciated by civilian. Knowing Google Earth is capable to generate over one billion U.S. dollars on ads, it’s not surprising to see local versions of similar applications in China and India with the support of the local government agencies.

At present, Geo Globe is in an internal testing stage. It is being used by Heilongjiang Geographic Information System, Hydro department in Fujian and the National Defense Department.

China has launched its own version of an Internet network through the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The network (CERNET2) has linked up 167 institutes and departments at 25 universities in 20 cities. Countries like US, Japan and South Korea are also researching and implementing IPv6 network infrastructures.

IPv6 is expected to be 100 times faster than the current Internet speeds (at speed of 2.5 gigabytes per second to 10 gigabytes per seconds). A Chinese company - Hua Wei is leading the IPv6 related hardware production where the five Chinese telecom operators, including China Telecom and China Mobile, are currently building IPv6 networks using the technology, with some of the networks expected to begin trial runs by the end of the year. This should be the first attempt of using IPv6 for commercial usage.

Chong Qing, the largest city (population wise) in China (possibly in the world) has rolled out a new law, all citizens must file a report to the local police stations if they want to surf the world wide web from home. The reporting process must be completed by October 30th, 2006. If one fails to file the report after the date, they may be un-plugged by the police for maximum of 6 months. The new law covers both dial up and ADSL / Cable Internet users. It is aimed for searching and capture "online criminals".

.CN domain names is the most registered domain extensions in Asia. It has exceeded the other regional domain names such as .jp (Japan), .kp (Korea), .sg (Singapore). By the end of the year 2005, there were 1.1 million domain names with .cn suffix, an 154% increase over the year 2004. It also has jumped to the 6th most registered suffixes internationally. The majority of the registered web sites in China are commercial web sites (60%), personal web sites (22%), education web sites (5.1%) and government web sites (4.4%).

The common speed with ADSL services in China are still 512KB to 1MB per second. However, in order to secure and expand the market, Beijing Telecom has just recently decided to increase the ADSL Internet service speed to 2MBPS. The new speed is twice or somewhere even four times faster than the previous services. All ADSL users in Beijing may apply to upgrade.

This "speed competition" was started by BBN, who has upgraded their customers' ADSL speed form 512K to 1M late in 2004. From doing so, BBN successfully took over 70% of ADSL coverage in Beijing. Beijing Telecom now offers a higher speed and some nice deals such as free installation (used to cost 300 RMB / 45 CAD$), 300-1000 RMB discount on the annual service fee. This is a great start for the Chinese Internet service consumers. It's about time to see some great acceleration on the Internet speed over mainland China.

Starting from March 1st 2006, the Chinese government will completely control the distribution of all .CN domain names. This include the four critical domain sublets: COM.CN, AC.CN, GOV.CN, and MIL.CN. Before the date, most Chinese domain registrations relied on DNS (Domain Name Servers) of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in the US. (Fact: ICANN controlled 1,500,000 Chinese domain names and the Chinese DNS servers control the other 1,090,000 domain names)

Starting in March, all of the Chinese government and military organization domain distributions and domain name mapping request will be processed by Chinese DNS. This means the request statistics of the government and military organization web site can be covered and hidden from the US much easier. These web sites and email services are no longer under foreign "surveillance".

Hi from Beijing China. Great weather here but a lot colder and drier than Vancouver. It's funny that the cab driver told me that the government of Beijing made a promise to the citizen that they would do their best to improve the air pollution in the city and they even guaranteed 200+ days of blue sky! It looks like their promise has been achieved as if today, 14 days before the year ends. I am sure the Mayor has crossed his fingers for less raining days as well.

Anyway, the biggest change I have experienced besides 100+ high rise buildings popped up beside my residence is that the Internet speed has increased dramatically by my ISP (ChinaNetCom). At a speed of 100Mbps, I can surf the American web sites at a fairly reasonable speed. I can watch most of the new Hollywood movie trailers, voice chat with my friends in Vancouver, Toronto and Amsterdam. Asian sites of course load much faster. I can watch full length movie and TV programs via this Internet connection at a better quality than the non-digital cable services! Will try some bench mark sites in the next few days to collect some first hand data, stay tuned. :)

Qian Mao, director of the Chinese Fiber Optical Communication Consortium recently revealed some new numbers of the high speed Internet usages in China. According to Mr. Mao, according to the data collected till end of June 2005, there are 103 million Internet users. Among them, there are 53 million high speed Internet users. The rest 50 million are using dial up Internet access. There are over 67% of the high speed Internet users use ADSL technology, which is approximately 33 million accounts. However, many users are not satisfied at the speed of the ADSL services. According to Mr. Mao's number, 5% of the high speed Internet users are not satisfied with the surfing speed, 17% of them are less favor and 40% feels acceptable but not great. My expectation is that the Chinese ISPs will boost the speed dramatically within the next 2 years to accommodate the growing VOIP industry and media deliver services. China has the largest high speed Internet service market in the world, but the government is still very much regulating who can provide these services. The room to grow in this industry is much bigger than other Asian countries such as Korea or Singarpore.

A recent study "2005 Internet Usage and It's Influence over 5 Chinese Cities" indicates the Chinese internet surfers spend an average of 2.73 hours on the World Wide Web each day. This is approaching to the figure 3.0 hours per surfer per day in the US (Data were collected from a representative sample of 4,839 American respondents between the ages of 18 and 64 in June 2004).

What’s more interesting from the report is that the study finds that near 50% of the online users use instant messaging software for work purposes from time to time. The reasons behind this include: “easier and faster than Fax and Email”, “The installation process of the software is much simpler than installing a telephone line”, “it’s much cheaper using chat since phone usages are charged per minutes even for in-city calls in China”…

The instant messaging software Chinese normally use are: QQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger. There are fewer users on iChat (less Mac users in China in general) and AOL. The amount of VOIP usage over the messaging systems has exponentially increased over the last six months.

According to Xinhuanet, China will soon put into use electronic GPS maps in 142 cities in order to weave a network across the country within 10 years. This project is carried out by China's Planet Map Publishing House and Shenzhen Maxwell Technology Corp. Ltd. The overall investment is at more than 100 million yuan (15 million CAD dollars), hoping to make the system cover major Chinese cities, counties and towns. According to the paper,the two companies have so far developed electronic GPS maps covering 19 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. The GPS system will be ported to standard GPS devices and advanced mobile devices (cell phones, palmtop computers etc.) The return of this investment is also huge, experts are quoted as saying that the market volume of electronic GPS maps is huge, exceeding 10 billion yuan (over 1.5 billion CAD dollars). With the increasing demand of automobiles, a consummate GPS system will gain its market in no time.

The current internet is built upon IPv4 technology where an IP (Internet Protocol) address is assigned to every single computer that is connected to the World Wide Web. A finite number (4,000 million) of IP addresses are shared across the world. Since Internet was originated in the United States, therefore, USA has the biggest piece of the pie which is over 1,200 million IP addresses. China, on the other hand, is a late comer and therefore has less than 60 million IP address. According to the population of the two nations, 22 Chinese have to share 1 IP address where a single American can have over 6 IP addresses. This obviously effect the Internet services in China and it’s surrounding areas. The current scarcity over Internet IP address is not only effecting China but also Asia in general. The solution to the problem is to roll out IPv6 for commercial internet usage as soon as possible.

Till the end of this year, China will have invested RMB1.4 billion to build a commercial IPv6 backbone network to connect all its major cities. The IPv6 network will be the largest in the world and will start full operation in 2006. The beta tests of this new network will start next month. IPv6 uses 128 bits address length which will generate an almost infinite number of IP addresses compare to the 32 bits length address (IPv4). However China is still limited to 2.2% of the overall IP address resources in the IPv6 era. USA will have 13.7%.

"We were a learner and follower in the development of the first generation Internet, but we have caught up with world's leaders in the next-generation Internet, become a first mover, and won respect and attention from the international community," said Wu Jianping, director of the expert committee of the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) and a mastermind in the development of the next-generation Internet in China.

CERNET was the first network that brought World Wide Web into China by laying out a national wide university based network back in the 90s. It simply changed how China sees the world and the world sees China. With the help from Intel and HP, CERNET is taking the game up a notch, in the past 12 months, a new network is being carefully planned and tested out – CERNET2. According to the newest update (December, 2004), the speed in the backbone network (IPv6) of CERNET2 reaches 2.5 to 10 gigabits per second and connects the universities at a speed of 1 to 10 gigabits per second.

The National Development Reform Commission (NDRC) set up a China Next-generation Internet (CNGI) fund of 1.4 billion yuan (US$169 million) to support six next-generation Internet networks. Half of them will be used on CERNET2-related projects. The rest of the money was given to five telecom operators.

In CERNET2, half of the key equipment, including routers, was provided by Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies and Tsinghua Bit-Way.
Huawei has already become one of the strongest competitors to Cisco, which achieved prosperity with the Internet and has a dominant position in related technologies.

- Data collected from China Daily ( 中国日报 )