Is it just me or is china telecom totally screwed up this week? I have like 350 ms ping to most BF3 servers in Japan and korea and like 200 to even some in Hong Kong. A few have low ping still, but after I play for 10 mins it starts dropping packets. Even bittorrent is going way slower than usual. Its really abnormally bad service even for China.

yup, really slow. 300ms+ pings to singapore. can't access speedtest.net and webex takes a much longer time to establish than normal. skype seems fine though.

Did anything embarrassing to China happen lately ?

probably just the spring festival personnel shuffle. they probably brought on a bunch of fresh out of college grads that don't know anything about routing protocols.

It's pretty much same with Unicom, I am getting 200-250ms to West Coast and not usual 130-160ms. Being happening last 2-3 weeks. Probably GFW changes.

Agree on all points. Slow as ****. China Telecom and Unicom.

Well, everything outside China is very slow now, even most Hong Kong datacenters slow for me (150+ MS latency and huge packet loss), while Mainlain network is pretty fast. Just going to Battlefield 3 servers list the best servers are like 110-150ms latency in Hong Kong and TW and there are maybe only 5 that are <200ms, when before I had 20-30 servers all <30ms and 50-60 servers at <100ms 3 weeks ago (all across Asia and Japan).

Yeah, same here. My latency has doubled, tunnels make no difference. Averaging around 25-40% packet loss. I've gone from 200-300 to a solid 500-800 in general. In the evenings my latency can start hitting 2k on west coast. It's driving me up the damn wall.

OK I am based in Taiwan with good fiber so its not an issue outside of China.

My own customers in China are not having speed issues from me as latency does not affect their services. From Taiwan into China latency is not high

SatelliteTV wrote:OK I am based in Taiwan with good fiber so its not an issue outside of China.

My own customers in China are not having speed issues from me as latency does not affect their services. From Taiwan into China latency is not high

They blocked speedtest.net now in Mainland, so people around world won't know how crap internet is. I think it was really funny how they buffed speed of Chian Telecom customers to 10-20Mbps with free upgrades brining East China avrage speed from like 2Mbps to 11Mbps and totaly blocked speedtest to ensure no further crappy changes will bring China raitings down.

It seems to be a little better now for main routes but there are still some to japan, singapore and HK that seem totally messed up and slower than they should be. Amazing you used to be able to get 130ms ping to west coast on unicom, Best I've ever gotten is like 160 with my VPN. China Telecom might get you like 180 at 4 AM but you still get dropped packets. The rest of the time its more like 300ms.

There are only a few servers in China that show up on the speedtest.net China map. I doubt the PRC Government really cares about the ratings anyway.

Somewhere in far west China, Leshan



Wenzhou. All my lines are configured to get the best upload to other places. This is a 5mb upload line I have been testing on. Obviously as I am streaming TV content into China the upload I get into China is key for me.

Bakou wrote:It seems to be a little better now for main routes but there are still some to japan, singapore and HK that seem totally messed up and slower than they should be. Amazing you used to be able to get 130ms ping to west coast on unicom, Best I've ever gotten is like 160 with my VPN. China Telecom might get you like 180 at 4 AM but you still get dropped packets. The rest of the time its more like 300ms.

I am playing Warcarft from time to time, in November/December/January before holidays, sometimes I got 90-98ms latency to West Coast Blizzard datacenter, but usually was at 130-150ms even during peak hours with 0% losses. Same was with Battlefield, I had 110-150ms latency to servers in LA and San Francisco. I guess they had something messed up and now back to "normal" 200-250ms. How quick you could get used to "somewhat good" connection.

Here is before:



And after:



Almost same time (around 5PM here in Shanghai), just in-game data for connection.

experiencing the samething here too.. thought someone was tapping onto my wireless doing some crazy downloads, but its just me, my phone and my tablet on my network. its got to be the upcoming lantern festival, same as every other years. or is it the valentine's day? who knows!

Crappiest Internet in the whole world....and now they try and cover it up by blocking speedtest....incredible.

You're in China and you're surprised by this?

tihZ_hO wrote:You're in China and you're surprised by this?

No not really....just really annoyed.

Makes me kinda want to switch to Unicom, of course my house is only wired for Telecom. It seems like they both have flaky routing, just in relation to different countries. Sounds like Unicom is a lot better for connecting to America and Hong Kong tho. I guess the most important thing is still choice of VPN server~

Speedtest is pretty useless since Chinese users don't really know about it and it also doesn't report FROM WHAT SERVER the other user got their speed record.. so it's totally meaningless to our geographically challenged and badly routed internet. We should start our own speedtest/pingtest for China to get some kind of useful information... as it stands there is no real way to tell if China Telecom or Unicom (or maybe even some 3rd party) are the best, it's all just based on hearsay and rumor

Swede00 wrote:

tihZ_hO wrote:You're in China and you're surprised by this?

No not really....just really annoyed.

Yea, isn't it?

A mate of mine lived just two blocks over from me, we had the exact same ISP and service, he was in a "Chinese" compound and I was in a "Laowai" compound and his speed was 2 to 3 times faster than mine! WTF is up with that?

There used to be a permanent tan line of a hand on my forehead

tihZ_hO wrote:

Swede00 wrote:

tihZ_hO wrote:You're in China and you're surprised by this?

No not really....just really annoyed.

Yea, isn't it?

A mate of mine lived just two blocks over from me, we had the exact same ISP and service, he was in a "Chinese" compound and I was in a "Laowai" compound and his speed was 2 to 3 times faster than mine! WTF is up with that?

There used to be a permanent tan line of a hand on my forehead

Have heard same thing. I live in JingAn area...and i complained almost every day before because my 2MB line was down to 0,2 MB. Recently I got 4MB fiber, and for a while speed was good, now it seems the speed has dropped again, but I can't measure it..because they blocked the speedtest page. Have to find another page that is not blocked.

I have no problems whatsoever with the speed of my service from Telecom. Is that because I don't live in a compound, but in a sixth-floor walk-up in an all-Chinese working class neighborhood? Wannabe robber barons who choose to insulate themselves from the society they came to cash in on deserve what they get.

ThomasCaron wrote:I have no problems whatsoever with the speed of my service from Telecom. Is that because I don't live in a compound, but in a sixth-floor walk-up in an all-Chinese working class neighborhood? Wannabe robber barons who choose to insulate themselves from the society they came to cash in on deserve what they get.

Thank you for your insight, I feel enlightened, I shall move myself and my family in with my Ayi forthwith.

China Telecom was amazingly fast during the CNY. I figured it was because a lot of ppl were gone. This past week has been ridiculous though. Even youku and tudou kept buffering. I just gave up on foreign broadcasts.

The speed has picked up since yesterday though.

ThomasCaron wrote:I have no problems whatsoever with the speed of my service from Telecom. Is that because I don't live in a compound, but in a sixth-floor walk-up in an all-Chinese working class neighborhood? Wannabe robber barons who choose to insulate themselves from the society they came to cash in on deserve what they get.

We live in a lane house in an all Shanghainese block (I believe "working class" is the correct term for here as well), so certainly have not insulated ourselves (nor are we robbers or barons or wannabes or any combination). The internet has been slow since we moved here last year, but this is much less of a problem since we are not doing any massive downloading (though movie streaming would be nice again). It is the instability of the network that is a problem for us. Particularly since CNY began the number of dropped connections has increased dramatically, often every ~15 minutes or so there is a dropped connection.

Does any one know of options that would allow for better connectivity? We have four computers, two iPads, one iPhone for three people who need the internet for work and school, as well as keeping in touch with family and friends in the US.

Kickaha wrote:

ThomasCaron wrote:I have no problems whatsoever with the speed of my service from Telecom. Is that because I don't live in a compound, but in a sixth-floor walk-up in an all-Chinese working class neighborhood? Wannabe robber barons who choose to insulate themselves from the society they came to cash in on deserve what they get.

We live in a lane house in an all Shanghainese block (I believe "working class" is the correct term for here as well), so certainly have not insulated ourselves (nor are we robbers or barons or wannabes or any combination). The internet has been slow since we moved here last year, but this is much less of a problem since we are not doing any massive downloading (though movie streaming would be nice again). It is the instability of the network that is a problem for us. Particularly since CNY began the number of dropped connections has increased dramatically, often every ~15 minutes or so there is a dropped connection.

Does any one know of options that would allow for better connectivity? We have four computers, two iPads, one iPhone for three people who need the internet for work and school, as well as keeping in touch with family and friends in the US.

Do you use VPN? If most, if not all, of the websites you go to are foreign, I think using a VPN is more stable and FASTER (b/c it skips the virtual Chinese borders that scan for banned keywords or sites). The VPN I subscribe to includes a PPTP service, which allows my Iphone and ipad to go online via VPN as well.

Anyway, if not for VPN, I wouldn't be able to survive in China w/o swearing at the internet a couple of times a day (which was what I did in my early days in Shanghai).

In general the VPN's are not faster. if you ever find a VPN that's faster than general internet please let me know It doesn't skip the borders, it just encrypts your traffic and then makes it appear as though your traffic is going to their site and no one else's. All of the same checks are still run by the GFW, they just can't see anything 'bad'. However, it may make international browsing appear faster simply because you are not waiting for that Facebook "like" button on every damn page in existence to time out before the page loads.

Tunnel's on the other hand CAN be faster and more often than not are, these are mainly aimed at gamers though and only certain ports are permitted to connect (the gaming ports). Even tunnels are suffering at the minute though in my experience.

In Shenzhen, the situation is better - speedtest.net is still blocked but after testing a large driver download with flashget l was getting speeds of 5mbps and my VPN is streaming the iPlayer perfectly. China Telecom have just put us up to 100M with a new fibre optic line (which they are advertising all over here), wasn't getting over 10 until l bought a new wifi router, seems as though it was too old to cope with high speed. Before speedtest went down l was getting 75M Download and 3M upload from the speedtest server in Maccau - pretty impressive really if you ask me.

I got the China Telecom new package of 20 meg line last week and my downloads have gone from 100kps to 1900kps average. If my VPN is on i can exceed 2400kps. Got the new episode of Californication in just under 5 minutes last week.

now try playing an online game

The world of p2p torrents and online gaming is a different beast in my experience.

It's ok to steal software/movies, god knows it's pretty much partay endorsed. However, online games are places where people go to stir up nasty sentiments, they are addictive and corrupt society, they need to be stamped out at all costs! (unless ofc there's money to be made...) As such the ports necessary for gaming are often throttled.

NorthernLights wrote:In general the VPN's are not faster. if you ever find a VPN that's faster than general internet please let me know It doesn't skip the borders, it just encrypts your traffic and then makes it appear as though your traffic is going to their site and no one else's. All of the same checks are still run by the GFW, they just can't see anything 'bad'. However, it may make international browsing appear faster simply because you are not waiting for that Facebook "like" button on every damn page in existence to time out before the page loads.

Tunnel's on the other hand CAN be faster and more often than not are, these are mainly aimed at gamers though and only certain ports are permitted to connect (the gaming ports). Even tunnels are suffering at the minute though in my experience.

Yeah, the embedding of social website buttons on web pages does slow down the loading in China, since most, if not all, of these social websites are blocked in China.

But I swear the internet becomes faster with vpn turned on. Everything from Gmail to the NYTimes to MSNBC to wikipedia. And downloading from itunes and torrents also become faster. How fast? A Rachel Maddow itunes Video podcast can be downloaded in 7 to 20 minutes compared with the 1~2 hours or 14 hours (The chinese internet speed fluctuates a lot) it takes without vpn. A decently seeded torrent movie of 700 mb is done in less than an hr with vpn.