20
April
2011
|
03:45 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Pointless Stats Comparing China And The US Online...

Pingdom has published a long list of statistics comparing China and the US in all things Internet related: numbers of users, speed of connections, numbers of hosts, etc.

I'm usually a fan of Pingdom's posts because its position as a web site monitoring service gives it a great position from which to point out interesting trends. But not this time.

The stats are interesting according to each country but comparing one against the other is an apples versus oranges exercise that provides no insight.

The two countries are in far different places in terms of development of infrastructure and usage. It would have been better to compare China with say India, or the US with Germany.

The Pingdom post struggles to make meaningful comparisons, such as: the fact that US Internet penetration in the US is 77.3% and 31.6% in China.

Pingdom concludes: "An interesting note here is that China has a ton of room to grow, while the United States doesn't."

Here's another: Internet user growth over the past decade was 152% in the US, and 1767% in China. Hardly surprising coming off of a small user base.

And it goes on, and on, side-by-side comparisons that mean little in their context.

The one statistic that did catch my eye was the one on average Internet connection speeds. My AT&T DSL connection of 2.5 Mbit/s is well below the US average of 5 Mbit/s and is much closer to China's 1 Mbit/s average.

Well done AT&T - keeping the US on technology's bleeding edge. A good reason why AT&T should not be allowed to regain its monopoly.

You can check out the Pingdom post here.