Major ISP players in China have slashed their prices considerably to make high speed data accessible to every Shanghai home.
Right now there are three big companies who have cornered the Chinese ISP market.
Shanghai Telecom Co., Ltd. who provides fibre lines using the FTTB with LAN technology or the FTTH service. Subscribers also have the option of an ADSL connection over copper lines.
China Unicom and Orient Cable also have a fair share of the HSD slice.
China Unicom
China Unicom is the most ambitious of the trio and this is making China Telecom very nervous as it feels threatened about not being the market leader in China anymore.
Consider the price plan of China Unicom as advertised on their website, www.sh.chinaunicom.com:
Qualifying Shanghai dwellers can get speeds up to 30 Mbps using China Unicom’s fibre lines. Here is their rate tariff:
10 Mbps @ 198 Renminbi per month
20 Mbps @ 248 Renminbi per month
30 Mbps @ 288 Renminbi per month
If for some reason you only have access to ADSL service in your home, then China Unicom can still give you blazing speeds up to 6 Mbps: The price per month can then be as low as 144 Renminbi.
Shanghai Telecom
Shanghai Telecom in an attempt to upstage China Unicom has big plans to provide fast and reliable fibre connection to the entire population of Shanghai by 2013.
Fuelled by competition from Shanghai Telecom, China Unicom has attractive bargains for the Shanghai public.
However, Shanghai Telecom has the upper hand when it comes to superior network architecture and access to a wide pool of resources. Hopefully China Unicom will come to par with similar technical capability in their backbone structure in the near future.
According to Shanghai Telecom’s official website, sh.ct10000.com, their lowest price subset is 10 Mbps fibre connection @ monthly subscription of 188 Renminbi. If your area is not yet covered by their fibre service, you can avail a 2 Mbps ADSL connection at 178 Renminbi per month. To top up the deal, China Telecom even sells you a telephone service as a bundle so you get discounted telephone rates too. This is not all. In an attempt to attract more customers or not lose existing customers, Shanghai Telecom even throw in extra servings of free caller ID, ringtones of your choice and free Wifi access to beef up your telephone service.
Orient Cable
Orient Cable is also in the market should you be looking for more options. However, where rate plans are concerned OC is nowhere near in comparison to Shanghai Telecom or China Unicom. Their best offering is 1 Mbps connection for 110 Renminbi each month.
Summary:
Here are our best picks in ISP service for the benefit for Shanghai dwellers according to category:
Fibre connection
Shanghai Telecom’s 188 Renminbi service for a 10 Mbps connection, provided they do offer this service in your area.
If you desire more than 10 Mbps speed then the 30 Mbps service offered by China Unicom for 288 Renminbi is the best deal in the market.
ADSL connection
China Unicom’s 4 or 6 Mbps packages are yet hard to beat. If China Unicom does not have this level of service in your area, you still can get 2 Mbps service for 150 Renminbi to tide you over.
Wireless service
Currently, all Wifi plans are unaffordable for Shanghai homes.
However we strongly recommend you to purchase a vpn in order to increase your internet speed. Even if the theoretical speed can be high, in real due to the filtering most of the website you are used to connect on back home will be very slow or blocked.
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