I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem i'm having setting up a reliable and dependable internet service for a friend who recently opened an office on Deng Feng Lu.

Currently he's on a standard domestic 2mb/sec ADSL through Lan hub with 3/4 computers on a basic XP network.

The problem we're having is that any overseas websites or services we try to use appear sluggish and mostly fail after a few moments when transferring files and so-forth. At first we suspected a bad network configuration, then a poor ISP service but perhaps the problem is more complex; involving a bottleneck occuring with China's firewall filtration system and overseas content.

As you might have realised, we're getting pretty frustrated with this situation and any guidance, advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If a service upgrade or alternate service provider is the answer then we are willing to look into these options. But we'd like an explanation of the problem before we set about throwing time and money at it ! Much appreciated

PS: if anyone would care to review their current ISP service and speed as a followup, it might prove useful for anyone interested in this kinda thing...

I'm prett sure it's the firewall bottleneck. I made a thread about this a couple of weeks ago. Until then my 2mbit ADSL connection was running smooth in regards to websites, however since about 3 weeks ago international sites have been incredibly slow to load (or won't load at all) and downloads often fail. One thing to note is that I can still reach my maximum 220kbs when downloading torrents. So this suggests it's not my connection but rather a bottleneck in Beijing. VERY frustrating, especially for a business. Some people have suggested this slow down is an intentional response to a certain anniversary a month ago.

We are having the same problem and are very frustrated. I've heard that there is something you can get in Hong Kong that will bypass Beijing and your internet will run through Hong Kong. This is much faster but I'm not sure what's it's called and if you can get one around here.

Try PersonalVPN from witopia.net. It doesn't work for youtube, but it does work for blogger wikipedia, and it speeds things up.

Yeah any VPN connection like witopia or one through a business should speed many things up.

Some people theorize that since the censor system can't analyze the contents of such streams, it just lets them through, therefore avoiding the firewall bottlenecks.

I have the same problems these days as everybody elese has them. I live in northern Kunming and am connected via 4mbit ADSL (4096ks down and 512ks up) and from day to day the speed of my connection changes. From almos no connection at all, to damn sluggish, to pretty fast.
I tried to delete all "domestic" failure sources; put other routers, put other modems (yeah, i'm a geek but not a pro) but nothing improved helped.
Like 6 month ago one could say: I have fast internet to 10am (that's when the offices start "working") then it will slow down and get fast again round 10 in the evening.
So the problem lies directly at the border of China-mainland and is called "Project Golden Shield" (scary hugh?). It's also known of course as the great firewall. So when you understand how it works it's pretty easy to understand why speeds can differ that much here in Kunming.
If you type in an URL and hit enter, a request is send to the dns server (normally) and after that you computer actuall starts downloading the page you requested.
Here in China these request is captured by the golden shield, which will first of all copy it. Then it's transferred to a pretty strong server, while setting you original request on hold. The server will start downloading the page you requested and scan it for unapropiate content. If it's clean your original request get's it's permission to travel through the shield. If not, you request is simply denied and you get the nice "this website is not avaiable"or "the request timed out".
The big problem for this is chinas limited connectivity to the "rest of the world" there are only 3 or 4 outgoing connections, this is what creates a pretty nice bottleneck.
Actually the response time of you connection sometimes goes up by almost 1000% (means the ping time rises from around 80 to 800ms). But also the data transfer rate is bottlenecked.

What can you do about it? For me, a vpn (virtual private network) is the tool of choice. VPN creates a so called tunnel between two computers anywhere on the earth. It's like pulling a really long LAN cable round the globe, without any steps in between (ahh, except of golden shield).
A VPN connection is secured, means that even golden shield can not examine it's contents. But: It slows down VPN connections in the same way it slows down any other connection, by simple giving it some extra rounds in a big server.
You may ask why, and my answer is: I do not know. Maybe they want to artifically slow everthing down to prevent every chinese to use vpn's.
And before you ask..., VPN is a pretty safe investment for the future because golden shield can not stop all VPN-connections because literally every western company in china is hooked up via VPN to it's home computer anywhere in the world. Second of all, all bank transfers are made via VPN and it's very hard to cancel them all.

So how do can one obtain a vpn connection. There are millions of services out there. First of all one should be aware, that in a VPN, your computer get's the IP adress of the computer at the other end of the connection. So if you VPN is based in america, you will get an american IP (enabling all the nice little content on hulu, youtube, etc...).
Just google for VPN.

My tip: Try "Anchor soft"s "Hotspot shield". It's designed to secure your connection from Wirelss hotspots but works via a VPN. And it's free (of course you will be served a little bit of advertisement).
So if you realized that you're in China and can't really influence the speed of your connection to "the rest of the world", but realized you can work on the reliability and wan't to tryout a VPN service, this could be a start.

So, as I said I'm not a professional. If I'm wrong please correct me, I gathered this information all around the net.

And please, do not use VPN's to reach blocked sites in china, since this is illegal. Thanks.

Firstly, I don't have much knowledge of Internet technology but an early experience that I had may be of interest.

Before coming to China, I had a .com business Website that had no 'sensitive' material. It was on Yahoo's business network. Arriving in China I registered the same URL Website with a local provider -- it worked for a few weeks and, then, became blocked.

Through a friend of a friend I had a meeting with a person in the PSB associated with Internet monitoring. I was informed, quietly, that as there is so much traffic going through the system they are unable to provide sufficient monitoring -- even with the best computers. Therefore (and this is interesting) if they actually catch something illegal, they will block hundreds of sites (usually innocent) from the same location.

Thus, I contacted a local provider who simply changed my .com Website to a .cn Website and there was never any more problems.

The above is kind of true although it is not to do with TLD (top level domain, eg .com, .cn .co.uk). The URL including the .com or .cn are just aliases which point to an IP address. When the local provider changed the TLD to .cn they must have moved the site to a different server/IP address at the same time, possibly also moving to a chinese domain registrar and nameserver too.

The Firewall doesn't actually block URLS but the IP addresses they are pointing to. The reason that sometimes sites that have no suspect content also get blocked is that they are sharing an IP address with a site that is considered inappropriate. The basic hosting packages that are available online are usually called "Shared Hosting", where the site is hosted on the same machine as many other sites all sharing an IP address. The only way to be sure that a site has its own IP address is to get either a virtual server or a dedicated server.

Back to the original point about the slow down. I've noticed a huge slow down in the last couple of weeks both at home (4MBit ADSL) and work (6Mbit fibre). Someone we spoke to at CTC revealed (although quickly backtracked so it may be secret) that some major repair work is currently going on. I don't know, perhaps the people who are digging for the new underground system punched through a cable!

"punched through a cable!"

haha, that was the excuse for an internet blackout i experienced in myanmar...

the locals referred to this as a "whale knocking the cable"

thanks greg, bernie and design for the posts, they were all helpful!

Here's another clue to the puzzle. I'm doing some traveling outside China right now and it seems to take an awfully long to access Chinese websites. It would seem the slow down is both ways.