No dirty tricks from Internet providers: ministry

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Do you know the exact speed for your wired Internet connection at home?

Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world tend to hide critical details about their products to cut costs. But the Chinese government wants to end that, by launching a crackdown on little tricks ISPs like to play.

The trick

The number you learned from your ISP is usually the "download" speed, not the "upload" one.

You may have felt significant speed difference between getting and posting your photos from/to a cloud storage like Google Photos or iCloud.

When you upload, the cloud seems more distant. /VCG Photo

It also means if you send a video directly to your friend/boss, it can be eight times slower than the speed you buffer a video on YouTube.

The numbers speak. On American ISP AT&T's website, there's a detailed description on that huge difference. If you have a product called "Internet 75," that means you get a download speed up to 75Mbps, but an upload speed up to only 8Mbps -- actually that's more than nine times slower.

Click here to see the difference yourself.

This trick was also used by Chinese ISPs for years.

Crack down on details

Since 2015, the Chinese government has been pushing hard to boost Internet speed, and cut price at the same time.

The results are good. In 2007, the typical Internet package in China is 90 yuan (about 12 USD) per month for a 4Mbps connection. Now in 2017, the same price can give you a 100Mbps optical fiber.

But it's another story for upload speed. For the 100Mbps package mentioned above, the speed you upload videos to Youku may still remain at 4Mbps like 10 years ago.

In the modern world, that's not always tolerable.

China's MIIT, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, has on Monday published an announcement to make ISPs behave.

VCG Photo‍

Before the end of November 2017, ISPs are required to change their advertisements and contracts with users. No exaggeration on speed is allowed, and upload speed must be shown in a significant way (instead of a small article buried up in the official website, like some US ISPs').

Other tricks were also addressed in the crackdown, like "the trial trick" -- first a free trial, then start charging afterwards, without users' permission.

"Shared bandwidth" between households is still allowed, but users must be well informed before paying.

Now that China's broadband connectivity has risen from 27 percent in Q4 2014 to 81 percent in Q1 2017 (according to Akamai "State of the Internet" report), it seems to be a good time to work on details.

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