It's not a practical solution, but you could live in Chenggong if you need fast speeds all day. There is probably brand new wire for an entire city there shared among like 30 families.

Ha. 29 if you count the apartment swap in classifieds.

I believe, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that all 3 main Chinese providers are owned by the government. As such, there is no real competition and being government owned, the employees or companies in general have no need to excel. As such, slow speeds and bad service will continue to be the norm until they have some real competition in their infrastructure.

Costumer service really sucks at least here in Kunming. The staff are LAZY with a capital 'L'. That being said, you really have no choice but to grin and bear it.

There's an article about Iran blocking VPN here:
www.nbcnews.com/[...]

It sucks when your internet is slow and you can't use a good VPN.