Slow internet in China - A fact of life?
 

I'm on my 3rd China visit in 18 months and have found that the internet isn't exactly speedy. Browsing to various web sites (typically but not always US sites) is noticeably slower than in other places I visit and connecting to my office in the US through our VPN is an exercise in frustration with things being very slow at best and connections dropping frequently at the worst. Using the VPN in Japan is almost as good as being in my office in the US, but the same thing here results in my being able to get very little done remotely.

This comes as no surprise on the local office DSL/wifi connection I'm using today but it wasn't all that much better at a Qingdao hotel where a speed test showed 65MB download and 35MB upload speeds.

Am I just having bad luck or is it like this for most/all people here? Is any of this due to the monitoring that goes on here and simply can't be avoided? Are there reliable and cost-effective workarounds such as a mifi device? I may be coming back here for a 2-4 week stint and would like to have better internet service if possible.

You call 65MB/s download and 35MB/s upload slow?
Even 65Mbps would be super fast in US standards.

I think his implication was that while 65/35 is fast by almost any standards, accessing sites outside of China does not result in these speeds.

My office in Shanghai has a T1, and it's still not especially fast.

However, I have one friend who has a hardware based VPN, and his internet simply sails over a normal residential China Telecom connection. I looked into getting one myself, but decided that the price was a bit rich for my budget (y3,000/month).

To clarify what I said earlier, the speed as measured by the speed test was a blazing fast 65MB down and 35MB up but the actual experience of accessing sites outside of China and using a VPN connection the US is frustratingly slow and full of lengthy delays & dropouts. It's like a really bad DSL connection a lot of the time and even a simple Google search (which goes is directed through their Hong Kong site) can take a minute or more and will sometimes time out partway through loading the search results.

You can configure Chrome to default to the true Google. It isn't any faster, but has more relevant search results for those of us who are not Chinese.

Why not just buy a router with VPN capability (and any router that can be flashed ith dd-wrt would work just fine)? That's what I have at home, though it doesn't result in any change in speed.

Honestly, I've waned off my need for a VPN (I can live without FB, NYT, Twitter, Youtube, Slideshare, and Google is really pretty good most of the time). I don't envy my friend's router for its VPN functionality, but I do for the fact that it transforms Shanghai's snail's paced internet into a product that reminds me of the computers in the Stanford libraries. He explained the technology to me a few months ago; the details escape me, but the gist of it is that it is constantly pinging thousands of computers all over the world.

Ah, I see. This is something other than just a hardware VPN.

I remember sitting in the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou in early 2005 getting increasingly frustrated by the internet speed. Thus, I got up and wandered to another Shamian island hotel, in a flood, to find that they had the same thing. A visit to a random internet place in Shanghai a couple of weeks later (come to think of it, didn't even show a passport at that time) was even less successful.

Since then, I feel like China, even as it continues to block access to various websites (unless of course you like being oblivious to it all), has been as welcoming to foreign internet users as Japan. Which is to say, not very welcoming. But at least the speed has increased overall.

This reminds me of a friend's apartment in Shenzhen (near Yantian). He was able to get signals from both China and Hong Kong. Baidu was a hoot.

The fastest internet speeds I've experienced during my life to date were at a budget hotel in Hiroshima about 4 years ago; I was able to download feature length films in under 3 minutes.

I think it's basically the latter, although there may be workarounds. The filtering slows things down a lot. I believe that speedtest and similar sites aren't getting filters so the speeds show as fast.

My comment wasn't so much about comparing speeds as it was about how irritating it is to find a place to connect. Though, your point is on-topic, so it's all good.

As a foreigner, using a net cafe in either country will probably require you give a scan of your passport/some ID and/or give an address. There's not always a non-smoking area, but if one is already familiar with Japan and China, that shouldn't be too surprising. Moreover, if you're staying at a hotel they've got a scan of your passport anyway, but it's more that some people don't like carrying valuables around.

Free wi-fi seems more prevalent in China than in Japan, though with Toyoko Inns (a Japanese chain) finally offering it, perhaps other places will follow. Though, it's a bit disappointing that at PEK, you have to again use your passport number (or at SHA I think, your phone number- not as big of a deal) to get access. At the same time, random hotel lobbies dotted throughout China have been auspicious wi-fi finds, whereas at Japanese "business" hotels this is almost unheard of.

显而易见, just a few BMB observations.

I think the main difference between the situation in Japan and China is that government regulations in China often seemed designed specifically to make it a pain for foreigners to use the internet (e.g. requiring a local phone number to get online at an international airport) whereas in Japan it's more a lack of English login screens and everything being behind a paywall that causes problems for visitors.

In the last few years, Wifi in Japan has become fairly ubiquitous, but it's almost never free. There's nothing explicitly preventing a foreigner from using it, as almost all of them will take foreign-issued credit cards, but there's usually no English so it's easy to conclude that it's "locals only." Even the hotspots that have a roaming login option to use Boingo or similar often bury the button somewhere that is impossible to find without being able to read Japanese.

The situation in Japan has actually been getting a lot better the last few years, with more English login pages and better roaming support. After many years, Starbucks in Japan just recently started offering proper free wifi as well.

Internet speeds - It is what it is in China. I've accepted it, doesn't mean that I don't get irked when google goes on the blink just as I'm trying to look up and work out some information. Frankly it's more than just being able to Facebook or Twitter, major blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger are also blocked. And websites that aren't blocked but have social media widgets installed take a long time to load.

I have VPN, both corporate and commercial - it helps a lot, but I'd much rather not have to put up with this.

Oh, and not to mention how chinese online transactions require MSIE. I never use IE, my home computing platforms are Mac OS. So whenever I need to do internet banking or transact on Alipay, I have to boot up the work computer to get it done!

As I said, for foreigners it's a bit of a nuisance in both countries, but also, as I mentioned about the Toyoko Inns (not to mention NRT now), and along with what you noted, internet access is getting a little more widespread in Japan.

Not that one's purpose in traveling somewhere should be to stay cooped up in a hotel, but I've found that, at least in Guangdong, there are plenty of (very) budget motels that offer desktop computers in the room, no registration required. Using a VPN to access Pandora and Youtube worked quite nicely, particularly because no ads showed up.

Also, I've stayed in a few hotels in China where I was able to convince the manager to put a router in my room; if they say wi-fi is available, but there's no signal in the room (based on my tablet and theirs), a bit of goading helps. Eliciting sympathy in Japan (even with Japanese language ability) would just lead to indirect eye contact, a few staccato gasps and gratuitous vocabulary.