Given that Asia dominates the list of 100 Fastest Internet cities and China is the most populous nation in the world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that China is home to the largest broadband service provider in the world. The latest data gathered by Telegeography, a research firm, shows that at the end of the first quarter of 2010, China Telecom led the top 10 broadband service providers rankings. It was followed by China Unicom.

The two Chinese ISPs account for nearly 20 percent of the world’s broadband subscribers. At the end of the first quarter of 2010, there were close to 492 million broadband subscribers worldwide, Telegeography notes. (Related: there are nearly half a billion broadband subscribers worldwide.)

China vs US

The rise of these two carriers also mirrors the rise of China as an Internet behemoth, pushing the U.S. into the second spot. The United States had four broadband ISPs in the top ten list: Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable (c TWC) and Verizon. Korea Telecom cracked the top 10 and edged out Telecom Italia, pushing it to the No. 11 spot.

These top 10 broadband service providers in total account for roughly 39 percent of world’s total broadband customers, and they collectively added about 23.3 million new subscribers between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010.

Who’s The Best Performing ISP?

While sheer size and scope matters, it’s also important to check out a service provider’s actual performance. Many ISPs make wild bandwidth and speed claims, but deliver a suboptimal performance from their broadband connections.

Ookla, the Seattle, Wash.-based company behind the popular Speedtest.net web service, has developed a new methodology (announced yesterday) that shows you the actual performance of broadband service providers from an end-user’s perspective.

“The new ISP ranking data takes a giant step in that direction, further empowering consumers for the first time with rich data that helps evaluate ISP performance close to home or throughout the world,” Ookla co-founder Mike Apgar said in a statement.  With nearly a million speed tests a day, Ookla has a good idea about which ISPs are performing well and are true to their claims. According to Ookla, U.S. ISPs deliver an average download speed of 9.9  Mbps while Chinese ISPs deliver an average download speed of 3.5 Mbps. South Korean download speeds, meanwhile, are around 31.5 Mbps.

How do U.S. broadband service providers rank? Ookla says Comcast is the best broadband provider in download speed terms, with an average download speed of 16.26 Mbps, while Time Warner Cable has an average speed of 13.48 Mbps and Verizon has an average of 10.76 Mbps.

Here are the top ten broadband service providers in the US based on download speeds.

1. Comcast 16.26 Mbps

2. Charter Communications 15.06 Mbps

3. Midcontinent Communications 14.36 Mbps

4. Optimum Online (Cablevision) 14.31 Mbp

5. RoadRunner (Time Warner Cable) 13.48 Mbps.

6. Cox Communications 13.41 Mbps

7. Insight Communications 11.75 Mbps

8. Surewest Broadband 11.44 Mbps

9. Verizon 10.76 Mbps

10. Prairiewave Telecommunications 10.52 Mbps.

You can see clearly that cable companies dominate this list.

Related Research Report from GigaOM Pro: The Internet of Things: Anywhere, Anytime, Anything. Buy for $199 now.

According to Ookla, in the U.S., the average monthly cost for broadband is at $47.32 or about $5.06 per megabit per second. In California, broadband costs just $4.24 per Mbps, while residents of Idaho pay $8.80 per Mbps, Washington respondents averaged just $3.89 per Mbps and Michigan subscribers pay $6.36.

Broadband Image courtesy of Flickr user Gavin St. Ours

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There is a resurgence of activity taking place around virtual desktops — where enterprises take their desktop compute environments, and make them configurable, deployable and manageable from a central location. The idea has been hanging around the fringes of IT for years, but I think the time may be right for businesses to actually deploy virtual desktops, for a variety of reasons. And since I think the time is right, I’ve also taken a look at some of the smaller companies that will challenge Citrix and VMware in this emerging sector.

The time is now

Virtualization is better understood and more widely implemented every day. The low-hanging fruit was in the data center, where the impact was less direct to end users and more about cutting excessive server spending and driving up overall server utilization. Now it’s time to find more opportunities to cut costs through virtualization elsewhere in the enterprise.

Devices, operating systems and connectivity are proliferating. Remember when you just had a desktop and a mobile phone that only made calls? For many, those days are long gone, and companies find themselves having to support desktops, laptops and mobile devices across a range of operating systems and a widely dispersed geographic reach. Getting away from hardware dependence and moving to a software-based virtual desktop model simplifies maintenance and reduces costs, helping companies handle device proliferation.

Enterprises are always looking at ways to reduce costs. Virtual desktops promise a host of management and infrastructure savings, including simpler deployment, less storage, and more robust security and compliance. For example, when many similar desktops are created, there is a huge opportunity to consolidate those common operating system images through de-duplication.

Hosted Virtual Desktops promise a massive buying change for enterprise infrastructure. Gartner estimates that the worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013 to reach 49 million units, up from more than 500,000 units in 2009. Imagine the opportunity for a large company to have the entire desktop infrastructure for thousands of employees hosted externally as a service. The slashing of capital expenses and migration to a subscription-based model is compelling for most businesses.

Who might win?

Many large technology companies have significant product offerings targeting this space, in particular Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, Cisco and others. But there’s plenty of interesting startup activity to follow, as well. So, with that in mind, let’s see who’s making waves around virtual desktop infrastructure.

Atlantis Computing offers its ILIO appliance, which it claims can shrink the storage footprint for virtual desktops by 20 times while increasing performance by a factor of 10. The company has an extensive partner list and does not attempt to offer a complete VDI solution itself.

Desktone offers the Virtual-D platform that allows enterprises to offer virtual desktops internally, as well as for service providers to host desktops off-site. The Desktone Access Fabric links these two worlds when needed. Desktone counts Citrix as an investor.

Viewfinity provides systems management, priviledge management, and user migration using an underlying virtualization technology that encapsulates existing OSes and applications to facilitate these functions. The company needs to tighten its messaging around virtual desktops.

Virtual Computer claims that its NxTop product is the industry’s first “bare metal” client hypervisor that provides true isolation and great performance, two issues that can be tricky for enterprises adopting virtual desktops.

Neocleus also uses a bare metal hypervisor to create separate instances of Windows on a single machine so applications can be contained to a single operating systems. The company did a partnership deal with Big Fix earlier this year, and Big Fix was acquired by IBM in June.

Unidesk helps customers manage virtual desktops in VMware and Citrix environments. The company’s Composite Virtualization technology separates the operating system from the application and user personalization layers for easier management. Unlike many others in this roundup, Unidesk lists a few customers on its website.

Leostream has a Connection Broker product that leverages the infrastructure of virtualization providers like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and IBM. Delivered as a virtual appliance, it manages the connection between end users and their virtual desktops and applications. Leostream also has a long customer list on its site.

Pano Logic offers a range of products and software tools that it bundles within the Pano System, including the Pano Device, a small network-connected “zero client” that has no CPU or operating system and simply connects to a Windows desktop image on a central server.

MokaFive which was founded in 2005 with a lot of noise around the concept of a LivePC has now focused squarely on the virtual desktop market. LivePCs are hosted locally, though they can be created, deployed and managed from a central location.

RingCube offers their vDesk solution which creates personalized workspaces. These workspaces can be hosted directly on a PC, a USB drive, a network drive, or through a virtual desktop hosted on a set of virtualized servers.

With enterprises looking to reign in the complexity and cost of managing employee computer workspaces, and the availability of on-premise and cloud solutions, it is only a matter of time before a few strong leaders emerge around virtual desktop infrastructure.

Gary Orenstein is the host of The Cloud Computing Show.

This week, a relatively large group of technology companies, along with NASA, launched OpenStack, an open source project designed to give businesses and service providers a top-to-bottom, and already proven, cloud computing platform. I’m all for openness, but as I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, it’s do not too difficult to play devil’s advocate and make the case that OpenStack won’t create true rivals for leading cloud providers or cloud software vendors.

Assuming the provisioning engine comes to fruition, OpenStack will undoubtedly see adoption from service providers wanting to offer cloud computing, enterprises wanting to build their own internal clouds, and IT vendors looking to beef up their cloud software offerings. If all comes together as planned, it should be a very nice solution. Just like everywhere else in life, competition in the cloud is a great thing.

However, competition for dollars and developers is plentiful, including large cloud providers, software vendors and even other open source options. The idea of a network of interoperable OpenStack-based public and internal clouds is appealing, but it would require stealing business and developers from a wide variety of other proven, innovative and commercially supported offerings.

Even within the OpenStack membership, conflicts of interest exist. How supportive can Rackspace really be of other service providers without cannibalizing its own cloud revenue? Plus, it’s also considering offering Windows Azure as a service. Dell already sells Joyent’s cloud software, and it’s also an early Windows Azure Appliance partner. If Dell does offer OpenStack as an open source alternative, it will be just that — an alternative. Other partners will support the OpenStack platform, but that’s on top of existing support for AWS, VMware and other industry-leading offerings. Supporting OpenStack is one thing, but pushing it to the exclusion of other options is something else.

Is OpenStack important? Yes. Will OpenStack attract a broad community of users? Yes. Will OpenStack-based offerings and deployments gather enough market share to make current leaders lose sleep? That’s not such an obvious answer.

Read the entire column here.

Photo courtesy of Picasa user elinenberg.

Infoworld: "VMware's hosted or Type-2 hypervisor has been around for nearly a decade. But has this virtualization platform reached end of life?"(author unknown)

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Twitter has decided to put the millions it has raised toward building its own data center, according to a blog post published this evening by the social messaging service. The data center, which will be located around Salt Lake City, Utah, should come online in the fall. The company also says it plans to “bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.”

We wondered if Twitter was going to build its own data center back in April after John Adams, a Twitter engineer, mentioned the proposition on a slide. However, I ultimately thought it wouldn’t, given that it had just signed a deal with NTT America to expand its dedicated hosting space. Apparently the deal with NTT stays, but the demands of keeping up with the 300,000 people who sign up to the service on an average day requires more customization and more control, which is the main reason Twitter gives for this decision. It also wrote:

Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications. Third, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.

Indeed, having your own data center is a big milestone for large-scale web services. Facebook announced a data center in January, and despite the lure of the cloud, other webscale operations are keeping some of their servers. Twitter had started out in the cloud, but moved from Amazon’s EC2 to Joyent and then to dedicated NTT hosting, after deciding latency in the cloud was too high. Perhaps Twitter, like Facebook and Google (the granddaddy of webscale infrastructure), has decided that aside from custom code, it needs a custom home for its hardware to ensure a strategic advantage.

Related GigaOM Pro research (sub req’d):

• For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center
• Social Networks Need to Grin and Bear Infrastructure Costs

Twitter has decided to put the millions it has raised toward building its own data center, according to a blog post published this evening by the social messaging service. The data center, which will be located around Salt Lake City, Utah, should come online in the fall. The company also says it plans to “bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.”

We wondered if Twitter was going to build its own data center back in April after John Adams, a Twitter engineer, mentioned the proposition on a slide. However, I ultimately thought it wouldn’t, given that it had just signed a deal with NTT America to expand its dedicated hosting space. Apparently the deal with NTT stays, but the demands of keeping up with the 300,000 people who sign up to the service on an average day requires more customization and more control, which is the main reason Twitter gives for this decision. It also wrote:

Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications. Third, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.

Indeed, having your own data center is a big milestone for large-scale web services. Facebook announced a data center in January, and despite the lure of the cloud, other webscale operations are keeping some of their servers. Twitter had started out in the cloud, but moved from Amazon’s EC2 to Joyent and then to dedicated NTT hosting, after deciding latency in the cloud was too high. Perhaps Twitter, like Facebook and Google (the granddaddy of webscale infrastructure), has decided that aside from custom code, it needs a custom home for its hardware to ensure a strategic advantage.

Related GigaOM Pro research (sub req’d):

• For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center
• Social Networks Need to Grin and Bear Infrastructure Costs

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DevX: "It's starting off to be a good week for open source configuration management vendor Puppet Labs. The startup announced today that it has raised an additional $5 million in venture funding, bringing total funding to $7 million to date."(author unknown)00435779240360818060

NTT America, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) and a global IP network services provider, today announced the latest evolution of VLink, a multi-location Ethernet solution that provides content providers, Internet service providers (ISPs), and enterprises direct connectivity among their multiple locations and provides an alternative to point-to-point connections.
Complete info at MarketWatch, EON and TradingMarkets.(author unknown)

Puppet Labs has raised a $5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for the open source configuration-management software provider to more than $7 million. Existing investors True Ventures (please see disclosure below) and Radar Partners, which participated in the Series A round, also contributed to this round. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software — version 2.6.

Puppet Labs is at the intersection of several trends occurring in the data center right now. Its open source Puppet software helps system administrators configure and manage the servers inside their data centers, a task growing more complex as computing demand increases. It is also attempting to build a business around open source software, which is becoming more common as startups like Cloudera, Karmasphere, Linaro and Riptano emerge to bring custom code built for webscale startups and cloud operations to the enterprise for private clouds and big data analysis.

Puppet is similar to the Chef software that Opscode is building on its hosted platform, only Puppet isn’t delivered today as a service. Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies said that one day he will deliver Puppet as a hosted platform, but for now he’s focused on ensuring that it’s built into every server sold today as the baseline management and automation platform.

The company’s current model is selling services associated with running Puppet in a data center environment, but Kanies says he eventually will start offering features tied to the open source Puppet code for specific types of users and faster deployment. He also plans to eventually offer the hosted platform, which would put Puppet Labs in direct competition with Opscode. However, Kanies said he believes the enterprise market is more comfortable with having its automation and configuration software on servers for the time being, and he sees a large market opportunity there serving folks trying to build out a private cloud.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related GigaOM Pro research (sub req’d): For Open Cloud Computing Look Inside Your Data Center

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