I was wondering if it would ever happen, but China Telecom finally announced a higher internet speed in China. The new infrastructure will be ready by the end of this year. Currently the highest speed available for ADSL is 8 Megabits/second, this will triple to 24 Megabits/second. According to the Shanghai Daily, however, in practice customers likely will have a real maximum speed of 3 Megabits/second (currently 1 Mb/sec). And thanks to the Great Firewall loading speeds of websites located outside China will likely stay far below this level.

It’s good news for high-bandwidth sites with servers inside China, especially sites that use video or large flash files, such as Toodou.com or online gaming sites. Possbibly IPTV could take off because of this. I expect a lot more broadband applications to see the light because of the higher available ADSL speed.