Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Lessons learned in China

My trip to China was amazing. I had a great time and learned a lot. Overall I'd say our learning system will work in China. Sight seeing was fun, but mostly Terrie and I enjoyed the shopping. Below are some of the lessons I learned while in China.

Lesson one- All the web 2.0 sites I use (such as this blog) don't work in China. I was planning on updating my blog on a daily basis as well as my Facebook and Twitter status. Of course if I had thought for a minute I would have remembered that none of these sites work in China.

Lesson two- Video sucks in China. YouTube didn't work, but Viddler did. Well, it wasn't blocked, but it still took at least 30 seconds for videos to play. I should not have been surprised by this, but I still found it weird that the people I talked to haven’t ever heard of YouTube. Although Viddler worked, it did not work very fast. Our biggest challenge seems to be streaming video.

Lesson three- There are decent server hosting solutions in China. China telecom is the hosting company run by the government. It basically hosts everything. We got a price from them equal to about 10K/year which does not include any service at all. if something goes wrong and we need a hard reboot- we have to hire somebody to go in for us and turn it off. We then met with a sub contractor who quoted us a price that was only a third of the price and included 24/7 support. So, what should we choose; cheap with service, or expensive with no service? Seemed like an easy decision for me- but apparently China Telecom is what everybody uses because it is so much more secure.

Lesson four- Test speeds indicate that most of our Westminster specific tools work great in China. Some of the test speeds are a little hard to interpret. Some of our wiki pages loaded in less than 3 seconds, and most less than 10 seconds. The video’s we tried to play took between 15-30 seconds to begin playing. The results were pretty consistent between testing on campus, in the hotel, and an internet cafĂ©. Unfortunately things were noticeably slower when we ran our tests at our interpreter’s house (it was a DSL line but only got speeds of about 500 kbps which might explain the slow load time).

Lesson five- Shopping in the bargain markets is fun especially once you realize how to play the barter game. Always offer 25% of their first offer and stick with it. I love how many of them would finally break down and give me the price I wanted because we were “friends”.

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