State Information Centre, China Netcom Co-operation to Fuel Transmission SpeedEmerging telecom operator China Netcom has forged links with the country's most authoritative information provider, the State Information Centre, to become partners in expanding Internet services.Under the agreement, China Netcom will provide a 100M (megabyte per second) Internet gateway to the portal of the State Information Centre to further speed up its data transmission. Described as the "carriers' carrier," China Netcom is the next major network resource provider after the giant China Telecom. And the State Information Centre is the most respected economic data provider with thousands of institutional customers including government bureaux, financial houses, research institutions and overseas investors. Its website has grown into the biggest and the most respected Chinese economic information provider. Its database construction and website content have made it the leader among all Chinese portals. China Netcom has become the network resource provider for many other basic telecom operators and is the leader of the country's 2,000 ISPs (Internet service providers), according to Qin Jie, general manager of the Carrier and ISP Customers Unit of China Netcom. Its development and network leasing business have broken China Telecom's monopoly in the field. For example, a year ago, a telecom line with 2M bandwidth from Beijing to Hong Kong would charge 400,000 yuan (US$48,000) per year. But after China Netcom started to provide a network leasing business, that charge was reduced to 20,000 yuan (US$2,400), revealed Qin. The money spent on leasing network resources was therefore reduced significantly and this will help spark a boom in the development of China's Internet industry, he said. China Netcom was set up in August 1999 to break China Telecom's monopoly in network resource. |
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