China over the last ten years has rolled out a superfast fibre-based broadband network, while Australia, who aspired to something similar, took a commercially conservative approach - abbreviated by the Coalition Government to "better, faster, sooner". At the time the Coalition won the 2013 election, China decided a FTTP network was the right approach. This approach is now showing up (ten years later) in the Global Rankings, Speedtest Global.
China is now in the Top 5 of countries (median speed: over 200Mbps) and has two of the Top 5 cities; Beijing and Shanghai; averaging close to 250Mbps). The median speed means 50% of users get faster than 200Mbps. Australia after some 15 years of NBN rollout, still sits (as a country) at around 80 in the world, with a median speed around 50Mbps. Our fastest city, Sydney, scrapes into the Top 100 cities in the world - slightly behind Kathmandu, Nepal (#92), Dehli, India (#87), Kharkiv, Ukraine (#85) and Moscow, Russia (#58).
See my dataset where I track Speedtest performance since 2017, for Australia's Top Ten trading partners. Partners include: US, China, NZ, UK, Germany, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, India and Singapore.
Figure 1- 2017 to 2022 Speedtest Global (China, US, Australia) - Accelerating China fibre use
Figure 2 - 2017 to 2024 Speedtest Global (China, US, NZ, Australia) - Accelerating US fibre use???
China's Fibre Timeline
| Year | Result |
|---|---|
| 2012 | 20M Fibre Users[1] |
| 2013 | Broadband Strategy [1a]; 2015 Aim 20Mbps speed; 50% of Urban use. By 2020, Aim 50Mbps plus 50% at 100Mbps plus some gigabit. |
| 2014 | 34% on FTTH; 68M users [1] |
| 2015 | 57% on FTTH; 120M users [1] |
| 2017 | 84% on Fibre; 289M users; 39% at 100Mbps or faster [1] |
| 2019 | 91% on Fibre; 396M users; 77% at 100Mbps or faster [2] |
| 2020 | 93% on Fibre; 417M users; 85% at 100Mbps or faster [2][3] |
| 2021 | 93% on Fibre; 489M users; 93% at 100Mbps or faster; 34M gigabit [4] |
| 2022 | 93% on Fibre; 554M users; 94% at 100Mbps or faster; 92M on gigabit (16% of total) [4] |
| June 2023 | 641M users; 94% at 100Mbps or faster; 128M on gigabit (21% of total) [5] Reality 1: Source: "Applications for it are pretty minimal ... It’s like putting a supercharged V8 on an ebike and driving it around Shanghai during rush hour. Like, yeah, in theory you could go super fast but the reality is less exciting." Reality 2: Source: "I usually don't bother with super highspeed internet in China since the bottle neck is your VPN (50Mbps)." |
| May 2024 | No update % on Fibre; No update on users; No update % at 100Mbps or faster; 163M on gigabit (26% of total); 5G users 805 million [6] |
| Nov 2024 | 1.13B FTTH/O ports (up 35.4M from Dec 23; 97% of total ports); No update on users; No update % at 100Mbps or faster; 10G PON ports for gigabit reach 26 million (up 3M from Dec '23); No update on number of 5G users [7] |
