Online: USA Vs China
By Pulkit Sharma

Swedish company Pingdom was founded by Sam Nurmi with “a very strong and narrow focus. That focus lies on covering the uptime monitoring needs of 90% of the companies in the world.”  By all accounts, the technology used by Pingdom provides a quality service to customers in more than 130 countries.

Pingdom has just released its research comparing USA and China online. Ten years ago, the United States was by far the largest country on the Internet. That is no longer the case. It’s been pushed into second place by China, with quite some margin.

Among the many statistics published in this Pingdom report are details of how China’s Internet user base grew an incredible 1,767% between 2000 and 2010. The United States more than doubled its Internet population in the same time, but needless to say, wasn’t able to reach those levels of growth.

The average connection speed in USA at 5 Mbits/s is five times faster than China.

What is interesting is how the Chinese Government has ensured that Chinese sites rule the local market.  The top 5 websites in the United States are Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube and Amazon.  The Top 5 Chinese sites are

1. Baidu.com (search engine)
2. QQ.com (online community)
3. Sina.com.cn (web portal)
4. Taobao.com (“China’s eBay”)
5. Google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong)

Ironically, even as Microsoft IE has only 47.5 percent of the market in USA, it has grabbed 87.4 percent of the market in China.  To add to the irony, Microsoft’s Windows XP has 82 percent of the market in communist China, twice of what it has back home.