There's no doubt that China Telecom has made significant investment and progress in Shanghai -- the local residents I spoke to agreed that when it is announced that a Chinese operator wil do something by a certain date, it gets done. SO they are expecting to have FTTH services offered to them by the end of next year. Currently, though, it seems that the FTT services are eing tested and trialled in a few select areas of Shanghai (which is enormous...) and so it may be that widespread commercial availability of high-speed FTTH-based broadband service packages will not arrive until 2012 in Shanghai.

The question is, though, will people pay for the service when it arrives? The cost of living is already very high here - property (rental and purchase) prices in the center of Shanghai are equivalent to London -- renting a tiny 2-bed apartment in downtown Shanghai costs US$2,000-2,500 per month. That is way more than I ever expected!!

Currently, it seems that a common experience in Shanghai is the use of a DSL service that was marketed as (up to) 10 Mbit/s and then get an average downstream connection of less than 1 Mbit/s because of the contention rates. So for sure people want greater broadband speeds and bundled services (Internet, VoIP, IPTV) but at what price? I imagine that 100Mbit/s will not be snapped up by too many unless it is offered at incredible monthly rates.