AsiaPundit » Blog Archive » China Internet Still Broken

-image-China Internet Still Broken

Confirming AsiaPundit’s own experience in Shanghai, Andrew Lih reports from Beijing that Mainland China’s international internet access is still exceptionally bad.:

International access to the Internet from Beijing has been poor since January 1, and seems to have gotten worse, likely due to folks returning from vacation and swamping existing links. Some friends mentioned that access to their corporate VPNs routed over the public Internet were virtually unusable from Beijing.

Google Mail is inaccessible half the time, or runs too slow to function. Skype is largely unusable. Downloading podcasts takes half a dozen tries through Apple iTunes, requiring a few different VPNs and SSH tunnels. I feel like Iâ€™m in the Internet Gulag.

Performance tends to be better in the early morning. I got a few hours of zippy performance from 4:30 am on, but by 7:00 am, the net was slowing again.

Meanwhile, Gemme finds the situation similar in Shanghai:

The Internet in China is still at snail speed and for some weird reason it gets worse in the evening.

Is everybody trying to play games after 18:00? Is the available bandwidth less in the evening to cut cost for China Telecomâ€™s use of satellite back ups or is there another explanation for this?

The news is that it will take until the end of the month to make the great leap back to 2007 but it wouldnâ€™t surprise me if we may linger a bit longer in 1997.

Our own Shanghai experience differs very little. At the office, access is painfully slow during the day. In the evenings access from home is near impossible. We had initially assumed that was because the corporate subscriber service had higher priority than our residential service. But it could be time-of-day related, as Andrew and Gemme suggest.

Several of the services we find vital at home — including Skype and BBC World Service streaming audio — have been almost completely inaccessible since the December 26 earthquake.

Although we have found office access moderately better, it remains unsatisfactory. Basic research takes far longer than it should and in some cases is impossible. And the economic tally of this must be vast. We know of newswires that have been unable to deliver services, merchants who are cut off from customers and have noticed that advertisements are not displaying on sites that are dependent on them.

Certainly, the Taiwan earthquake was an act of God for which China Telecom cannot be held responsible, However the length of time that it has taken to repair Mainland connectivity reeks of sheer incompetence. Apologies and compensation should be offered.

As a Mac zealot, AsiaPundit thinks punitive damages should be provided simply for causing us to miss the MacWorld keynote.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, internet

by myrick @ 2:46 pm. Filed under Asia, China, East Asia, Northeast Asia

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7 Responses to “China Internet Still Broken”

GZ Expat Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Guangzhou is perhaps slightly better than other places. But, my experience is the same as yours…during the day our home connection is brutal. Email is off and on…we cannot send large attachments. Some websites are unavailable…while others slowly come to life.

When I wake up in the early am (5:30 or so), the connection is bearable. The good part of it is the subnet is quite a bit better than it was…so torrent file downloading is better - perhaps 1/2 speed.

At work, I am spared. Being down here, close to HK, we have a lease line for everything…so, I can say our work connection is virtually unchanged from before the quake.

Agree with the incompetence statement. But…compensation? Baaahahhhahahahaa…best of luck.
The Unabrewer Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Still awful in the Haining area, FWIW. I imagine it would be similar to Shanghai.
myrick Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
You can get torrents? Lucky. That’s something I’ve been completely unable to do. Thankfully the pirates are still on the streets — otherwise we could have been forced to turn to CCTV 9.

We were also late with some necessary on-line banking — hoping the bank will forego a late-payment penalty on one card.
Andrew Lih Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
GZ Expat: Please don’t run Bittorrent during the day with our precious bandwidth! Honestly though, I do wonder whether BT downloads are hogging lots of the leftover bandwidth.

Myrick: I followed MacWorld by the autorefreshing: http://www.macrumorslive.com.
Mark Says:
January 13th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I work at an IT company and we are receiving so many requests from foreign companies to help them deal with this. We’ve been able to do some slight improvements by positioning servers at all datacenters with direct link to international bandwidth, and then rerouting traffic through them - however, I still can’t upload original photos to my personal American blog.
Nicholas Says:
January 14th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I am in China on business and family matters, I work on the internet usually 6 - 10 hours per day, since the quake i have to get up at 4am and work through until midnight just to get work done and its so slow during the day, I mainly do light SSH work and email and it just takes hours to do anything.

Considering the sheer number of people in China I am appalled at the time its taking to fix this issue.

I am wondering if this issue was USA based how long they would take to fix the cables when angry US citizens and businesses start phoning government heads.

Not a chance here in China I guess to complain.
Cyril Says:
January 22nd, 2007 at 4:16 am
It’s still so slow these days and I feel it’s getting worste here in Guangzhou.
Do we have a clear communication of what’s going on ?
Any information of how and when they will fix it ?

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