[seanmcdirmid]

I disagree with your claim that bandwidth in 1st tier cities is anywhere as good as in the states. At work, at home, and in the cafe my internet is always slow, even when pinging local sites (Beijing). I'm always amazed when I go back to the states to visit and I can use...Netflix at my sister's place. Americans have bandwidth that we Beijingers can only dream of.

True about IE and banks, but its easy enough to use IE when banking online and switch to whatever else you want.

I don't know what the numbers really are; I suspect IE use is still high but might be lower in Beijing given all the Macbooks being used by the middle class.

[xiaoma]

It sounds like you just have a terrible connection. I had a 10mb connection for < 30USD/month and regularly streamed HD video, sometimes US video through a VPN. At work was even faster. That was in Beijing up until this May. It looks like I'd have a free upgrade up to 20mb if I were still there!

http://battery-pack-adapter.com/beijing-unicom-broadband-spe...

As for banking, the problem was that their active X component was a .exe download. Even with IE, it wasn't doable on a mac. ICBC did claim to have a mac app in the works, but I didn't see it before leaving.

[seanmcdirmid]

Terrible connection in one location could just be a fluke, but in more than three locations? We've been thinking about upgrading our link, but many of our problems at home are that entire sites don't work, especially at night when internet use is very popular.

China is still not as wired as the states, South Korea is much better and could be considered to excede the states, even countries like Thailand and Indonesia provide much better bandwidth when I visit (and no GFW to boot!).