Hi there, moving into a new place and need internet. Can anyone recommend a good provider? I keep hearing of low bandwith problems etc...
Thanks!

ADSL speed depends on how close you are to the provider - the longer the distance - the worse your speed. Also speed to overseas always sucks a little in kunming - but most domestic sites are blazing fast.

Now - if you ask the ADSL guy - they don't have a clue...so it's hit or miss unless they can show you on a map where the nearest switching station is relative to your house. best speeds are within 1-2 km - which shouldn't be difficult since KM is only about 4km across.

Then the next problem is how many people in your area use ADSL - fewer the better...

Less people, faster speed - Check
Service people don't know anything - Check
Distance to switch determines speed - Check
Kunming is about 4km in diameter - errr...

- Kunming is about 12km in diameter (give or take one).

And let's talk about the term speed: Speed in Kunming is good and China Telecom delivers 400-420 kB/s downstream as promised (for most times of the day) and my upstream reaches 50-60 Kb/s too.
BUT!!!!!
Responsiveness for international pages sucks. If I want to open a foreign page it feels likes ages for it to build up. For me, this is because of my Ping of 500-750 milliseconds (some part is the Chinese monitoring service, the other part is the crappy electric cable that stretches like 40 meters through my backyard, compared to a time of 20-60 ms you get in Europe. The lowest ping I get is on HK servers with about 50 ms, whereas Baidu tops out at about 160 ms, but this is another topic.
See, when you open a page, your computer send several requests a) to a central directory (like a phone book) b) after that to the page itself and c) to advertisements or embedded items to the page.

So, what can you do?
Basically hope to be on a good cable to get a lower Ping, accept that the internet gets really slow around 10 in the morning and, hmm...I'd say 8-10 in the evening. Check with every service point close to you to find out if the 4M network is available in your area, and if so, get it! It is included in the E8 package for 188 rmb a month.

On the other hand there are supposed to be alternatives like fiber optics but I honestly don't know how to get these. What I do know is that it's very (!!!) expensive and time consuming (if not impossible) to order. Then we have China Tietong and China Unicom who are supposed to offer ADSL here (but everybody uses the same infrastructure here, so don't mind them).

I'd go for China Telecom's ADSL 4M.

Good luck!!!

Thanks a lot laotou and Pierre!

That would never happen here! A national intranet is much preferable to the anarchy and confusion on the so-called "free" internet (spit!). Here we have only 6 official websites and that is more than enough. We even had a case of intranet addiction last month. The fella couldn't release himself from the much visited www.korea-dpr.com/ thus missing his daily quote of pebble sorting. Naturally we had to club him to death, problem solved. China could learn much from us.