Coming Soon on techblog86: Wifi Around China

Starting, in effect, as of tomorrow, we’ll be adding a new column we hope you’ll like: Wifi Around China.

Coming in the form of individual posts, this is one of our “live columns” — as in we’ll basically blog live from anywhere that has wifi available.

Wifi is no longer that rarity that was back in 2002, when you were considered a super-trendy nerd to walk in with a laptop that supported what was then called, especially on a Mac, an “AirPort wireless network”. The Chinese authorities tried to stop wifi in its tracks around 2004, but like many of its short-sighted plans (including forcing users in summer 2009 to install censorship software), it failed.

Thankfully, despite the Great Firewall, there is still that connectivity freedom up in the air — something we call wifi. We’ll tell you how wifi works from a specific place by test driving it on a 15-inch MacBook Pro and a second-generation iPod touch. We’ll probably save the place from being robbed of wifi by not disclosing any wifi passwords, but you’ll be guided as to if you need a password to log in.

We hope you’ll like it!

PS: We will also restart weekday updates for the Mac blog on the new beimac Apple User Community — tomorrow at the earliest, next Monday at the latest.

從明天起，本博客將在中國大陸各地搜出無線上網地方，並且仔細闡述各個無線上網場所。本博客將使用一台 15 吋 MacBook Pro 及 iPod touch (第二代) 來進行測試。希望大家會喜歡這些新的內容!

Is 3G Slow in Beijing Today?

Not good news for those doing 3G: Two independent tweets coming out from @PhilipsShiu and @nielscn today reporting that 3G performance today, especially in Beijing, is poor. @PhilipsShiu reports that it’s impossible to log onto Google Talk via 3G, while @nielscn reports bad connections from the popular college hangout area, Wudaokou.

3G has had a pretty — beaten-up track record in China and around the world. Initial 3G-ish ads surfaced in 2000, right after the massive Nasdaq crash. Meanwhile, China’s adamant decision to come up with a PRC standard that would have went global — we’re talking about TD-SCDMA here — meant that it ended up as a flop. The telco mandarins eventually fed the flopped standard (if this makes any sense at all) to China Mobile, the nation’s biggest mobile telco.

China Unicom, in the meantime, was never known to be a network renowned for its quality when it comes to signals. Despite ads that would have brainwashed you that it was an affordable (even El Cheapo?) network that had good signals (信号好), most user experiences tell otherwise.

Oh and by the way — it’s good to be back on techblog86… we’ve switched back to the old, early 2008 “all blue” layout because we just plain love it. Good excuse?

今天，中國聯通的 3G 服務令人擔憂，有兩名推友 (Twitter 用戶) 發現，在北京一些地方，3G 難用，或者上不去一些站點，或者在某些區域用起來很費勁。

Service Announcement

This blog will resume publication effective April 22, 2010. Thank you for your understanding.