Chinese Broadband

This is an interesting story on how China is growing their broadband base. This fact pisses me off though:

Chinese broadband users now pay about $8 monthly, roughly 40% lower than in
2003, says BDA.

We end up paying more just because of the monopolies that some of the Telecoms control. If there were 5 different broadband service companies then we would get rates like this as well. Instead we are stuck with DSL from Hawaiian Telcom, Road Runner, and Clearwire. None of them costs $8 a month.

In any case this trend of Chinese Internet adoption should be good for these companies:

China's broadband growth will boost sales and profits for a wide range
of companies trading in the U.S., from Chinese portals Sina.com
(NasdaqGS:SINA - News) and Sohu.com (NasdaqGS:SOHU - News) and Chinese
search leader Baidu.com (NasdaqGM:BIDU - News), to U.S. giants Amazon (NasdaqGS:AMZN - News), Yahoo (NasdaqGS:YHOO - News),
eBay (NasdaqGS:EBAY - News) and Google (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News) as
well as infrastructure firms.
Shares of Sina, Sohu and Baidu have all done well this year. So have Chinese firms focusing on e-commerce, new media and online gaming. They include Global Sources (NasdaqGS:GSOL - News), Ctrip.com (NasdaqGS:CTRP
- News), Shanda Interactive (NasdaqGS:SNDA - News) and The9 Ltd. (NasdaqGM:NCTY - News)

I have owned Ctrip.com and made some pretty decent money off of them with both stock appreciation and selling their calls. I have also been checking out The9 for quite a while and they seem like a great company as well. They have some pretty nice call selling opportunities as well.