I've had a weeklong problem with my internet connection moving at snaillike speed, which got better pretty much as soon as I had a technician on the phone. (though I'd like to blame this for my dearth of posting last week, the real reason was that I bought a video game and lost all sense of professional responsibility).
The almost perpetual problems I've had with my internet connection here, has often led me to wonder if it could be calculated how much productivity is lost by countries that have telecom monopolies, or pseudo-monopolies. The textbook case being the incredibly poor broadband performance of the USA against countries like Korea and Japan, which has been studied in fairly heavy depth(lengthy but fairly fun). Basically three psuedo-monopolies dominate American internet distribution, have set up fairly heavy barriers to entry, and then impose restrictive pricing structures. Japan on the other hand, despite one of the companies being partially government owned, forces the dominant telecom companies to allow smaller companies to piggyback on their broadband networks. The pricing and technology competition has kept priced down, and pushed speeds up. The Korean government invests heavily in broadband infrastructure, which is then utilizable by all service providers, and provides soft loans to new companies in the sector.
So the Chinese telecoms being SOEs isn't a catastrophe per se, but the fact that they are monopolies means that nothing is being done to help broadband distribution, and that they're service is notoriously horrible (to be fair I think the speed of repairs at China netcom is impressive, even if they're phone operators think that you can't use WiFi in China, China Mobile though is notorious for having the worst service for a company in China).
Internet monitoring is also a big no-no for aspiring knowledge economies. The reason being it takes exceptionally large processing time to do things like patriot act monitoring or shutting down any website with naughty keywords. The former has meant that Japanese broadband networks have avoiding linking with American portals (see above link), and one could only imagine what the latter is doing to Chinese processing speeds as I doubt anyone is going to tell us soon.
Though I guess the one positive is that faster internet speeds would give me a lot more things to waste my time on.
