Originally Posted by docbert

I was in Beijing last week. Performance-wise I agree with your comments, but for Google Maps I found the performance more than acceptable - without a VPN! As is often the case with foreign phones, I had no issues accessing Google services using either my Sprint (free plan) or AT&T (corporate plan) phones. Realistically if the Sprint phone had been my only device I would have paid to get higher performance (or got a local SIM), but didn't as my AT&T phone worked fine.

In Japan at the moment and performance is great (speedtest shows ~5Mbps down), which is expected via that it's on the Softbank network.