High speed Internet access at universities, dorms, hotels?

[divirtual]

With the way that China is progressing towards the 22nd century, it's not good to make assumptions ....

In selecting accommodations at a university in Beijing, what's the situation for getting 24/7 high-speed Internet connections?

(a) Is this now becoming more common, or is widespread Internet access still limited to university buildings?

(B) Is wireless (802.11b) access common?

© Is open access to worldwide Internet sites (e.g. http://yahoo.ca) and instant messaging (AOL IM, MSN Messenger) generally possible? (Even if ports are blocked, there's always browser-based approaches like AIM Express).

I note that at least one hotel (the Xi Jiao, as indicated at http://www.accessmandarin.com/blcu_accommodation.html ) offers "free broadband internet access". I'm just not sure if that is way out of the ordinary, or not.

My prior experience in 2002 (staying on a business trip at the PuDong Courtyard hotel, in Shanghai) was dial-up access to corporate network. Strangely enough, when I tried to send e-mail to someone at a university in Taiwan using Eudora (on a personal e-mail account from Sympatico in Canada), the e-mail was blocked. When I sent the same e-mail via Lotus Notes on the corporate network (servers probably in upstate New York), the e-mail went through fine. This was before the days of widespread IM.

[flyinghome]

there are several kinds of internet in CHina

Universities usually are within the CERNET which serving for education and research, while most of the pulic users outside universities are within another network constructed by the telecommunication companies.

you can access to both by high speed, but the link between the two is the bottleneck. SO before you choose where to be accommodated, you have to decide which network is more important for you

I know the wireless access is not quite common,

as for your unhappy experiece, it is hard for me to understand i dont think it is because of the network, i would rather to believe it is because of a mistake somewhere

wish you happy in China