Shift Happens Statistic of the Day

From Wired:

After a week of delays, Japan launched a new, experimental Internet satellite on Saturday that shows why Japan is still so much farther ahead than the United States in terms of bandwidth.

The "Kizuna" satellite (the name, selected through a public nomination process, means "ties" or "bonds," in the sense of linking people together) is designed to give extremely high Internet speeds to rural and other areas that have been left off the country's already high-speed grid.

According to the project's Web site, ordinary home users will ultimately be able to get Net download speeds of 155 megabits per second (Mbps), with upload speeds of 6 Mbps. Businesses and other organizations using a larger receiver dish will be able to get connections of 1.2 gigabits per second.

No word on what the cost of home access will be, but still . . . 155 Mbps download from a satellite. A satellite? Think access from everywhere. Think off the grid. I think I have bandwidth envy.

Cisco's Big Switch: Shift Happens Fact of the Day

Cisco announced the Nexus 7000 - a switch capable of routing 15 terabits of data per second. According to this article,

the equivalent of moving the entire contents of Wikipedia in a hundredth of a second, or downloading every movie available on Netflix in about 40 seconds.

Or, if you prefer, according to this article,

It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.

Your mileage may vary, but still . . .

Flat World Update 1-28-07

Another quickie. This article in the February 5th edition of Fortune magazine quotes Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP as saying:

China and the Internet are still the two biggest opportunities. I went to China six times last year. The government always underestimates growth. The government says China has 1.3 billion people. I think China actually has 1.5 billion people. The difference equals one Indonesia, or 32 Britains, or two-thirds of the U.S. So I think the opportunity in China is greater than most people believe. China Mobile has 300 million subscribers. Think about it. That's the population of the U.S.

I think this is interesting on several fronts. First, a presumably knowledgeable CEO and international businessperson thinks that China might be undercounting its population by 200 million people (that's approximately the same number of people that live in 45 of the 50 United States). That affects all those fun statistics in Did You Know, and also means their market is that much larger.

Second, one cellphone company in China has 300 million subscribers. What kind of influence does a company like that wield? If they decide to send out a particular ad, or market a particular product or service, or steer their users to a particular search engine or company, they can immediately contact the equivalent of every person in the United States. That's some serious marketing reach - and possibly some serious influence reach. And if China does open up their society, that's potentially 300 million folks with broadband, mobile access to the world fairly quickly (just one company implementing impacts 300 million people almost instantaneously).

Finally, and I'm not a historian or a political scientist so I say this fully knowing that I'm naive about these things and some folks will probably jump all over this thought, but how long can China censor the rest of the world when 300 million people have cellphones from one provider (and many more from other providers)? When the Berlin Wall came down, freedom flowed - seemingly unstoppable. If this one company dropped the filters, what would happen? (I know, the company is undoubtedly owned or at least controlled by the Chinese government, but remember the Berlin Wall was presumably "controlled" by the East German government.) I'm sure someone will disillusion me (can I use "disillusion" as a verb?), but I can't help but feel a little optimistic about the possibilities . . .