Yes, 5 kilo bytes per second. Circa 1997 speeds.

-I am in rural 'none of you would be caught dead here' China.
-Usual speed is 60 kbps, now down to 5 kbps. DSL, I believe.
-I have a VPN solution. Access to the usual sites is open. My IP resolves to my VPN in USA.
-Speeds are identical with/without VPN on/off.
-Other teachers nearby cannot access at all.
-Cafes in town all have blazing fast speed.
-I have cleansed by DNS Cache.
-I have checked my DNS settings - 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4; ok.
-I have moved my hosts files to check for re-routing. None that I can see.
-Torrents and downloads also at 5 kbps, total.
-I have manually added ports for YouTube, torrents, etc. to Windows Firewall. No change.

I have had terrible speeds since last Friday, June 25. That is when the school let all the students out for summer until September. I am living on campus, my modem/router is off-site and not accessible to me at all. I do not have the password or log-in information, cannot access the router or modem though I have tried to surf out to them and crack them.

I have cleansed my DNS cache and reset the settings in tcp/ip but to no avail. Normally I get a slow 60kpbs here in rural nowhere but now it is 5 kbps, ca. 1997 speeds! I suspect my connection is being jammed, however what troubleshooting can I do to attempt to improve this speed?

I have a VPN solution. Speeds are identical with it or without it. Other teachers nearby, same campus, say that they cannot connect at all, it drops out immediately. Internet cafes in town are fast and speedy as they usually are. My IP resolves to a USA location so the VPN tunnel is functional.

yunnanexpat wrote:I suspect my connection is being jammed, however what troubleshooting can I do to attempt to improve this speed?

When I lived where no one would be caught dead I found that my internet issues could be resolved "fairly" painless by calling my ISP...

I have had terrible speeds since last Friday, June 25. That is when the school let all the students out for summer until September. I am living on campus, my modem/router is off-site

1. always investigate 'what changed'
2. if the modem is not in your dwelling, are you sure it's DSL and not FTTB? Because, FTTB is a locally shared connection, DSL is not.

In the past if you had vastly different UL and DL rates at different times of day or weekdays vs. weekends, this supports that you have FTTB. Everyone generally slows down between 3pm and 6pm when all the office workers start surfing, so don't include that.

@Coffee & Victor:

I will try to figure out which company my service is with and if its FTTB or not.

Since this slowdown commenced at the time that the school let out it is possible that the teachers and others who live on campus are also surfing PPS and such 24-7 and cutting the speed down.

I have FTTH plan. Look at my speed. FTTH is just a technology, it has nothing to do with speed and quality. Actually Fiber connection IS MUCH MUCH more faster than ADSL.

Just look at FiOS in US. FiOS is just a trademark for FTTB/FTTH plans from Verizon, but is the fastes internet available in US.

FTTB/FTTH is a shared connection, the building splits it between apartments. How much they split it and how much bandwidth others are using greatly affects the bandwidth that you will get.

so yeah, as a technology it's much 'faster', but in actual results will vary greatly here.

That may not be the OP's root cause, but people should be aware.

yunnanexpat wrote:

jb88888 wrote:

yunnanexpat wrote:-I am in rural 'none of you would be caught dead here' China..

Oh wow. Sorry, you're too special to take advice from the rest of us losers.

Your post was of no help to me at all.
--------------------------------------------
@Coffee & Victor:

I will try to figure out which company my service is with and if its FTTB or not.

Since this slowdown commenced at the time that the school let out it is possible that the teachers and others who live on campus are also surfing PPS and such 24-7 and cutting the speed down.

From your post, can I assume you get your internet from the campus network where you live? If so, the sudden slow down of your connection could have a few causes.
1)The campus is using the summer break to rebuild, refurbish, or otherwise change their network/intranet in some way and as result equipment has been turned off and/or bandwidth rerouted.
2) It could be the Universities in China get their internet connection for free from the state and during summer break, the gov. has drastically cut the bandwidth to save money.

My connection is a bit slow today.

To OP. It's probably weak internet connection in your school compound, why asking here for help? I think it's better to go directly to your school office to ask them why internet is so slow.

LtSaw wrote: ... go directly to your school office to ask them why internet is so slow.

And they'll tell you every ridiculous story that pops into their head

Basic networking tool : traceroute.

Figure out where the problem is, then you can direct the relief efforts.

I am going to the school office and see what I can find there.

Traceroute works just dandy and it helps me not one iota.

jb88888 wrote:

yunnanexpat wrote:Traceroute works just dandy and it helps me not one iota.

Sorry, I forgot that you're another braindead Republican.

If traceroute works just fine, where is the failure point ? I thought teachers could read ? Do you teach in that rural hellhole where none of us would be caught dead or do you scrub the floors ? Or are you a Creationist teacher from Oklahoma ? Or ... oh please god, not a missionary

As I posted there is no single failure point. When tracert'ed through my VPN I get 300 to 310ms hops all the way to the test website. You are assuming that this is a failure when it clearly is an issue of bandwidth. The packets are making their way all along the path, they just do so very very very slowly. There is no one bottleneck.

Maybe you can try 3G Mobile Broadband of China Unicom or Telecom. It possibly bring you surprise more than you would expect.

3GSolutions

Here is my traceroute on China Unicom FTTH plan:

traceroute to taobao.com (122.224.194.180), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.384 ms 0.874 ms 0.767 ms
2 58.247.184.1 (58.247.184.1) 3.264 ms 5.082 ms 4.849 ms
3 210.22.169.209 (210.22.169.209) 3.086 ms 7.984 ms 7.094 ms
4 * 112.64.241.214 (112.64.241.214) 4.872 ms 3.514 ms
5 112.64.241.250 (112.64.241.250) 3.486 ms * *
6 * * *
7 * 219.158.9.209 (219.158.9.209) 4.197 ms 3.864 ms
8 219.158.4.61 (219.158.4.61) 6.507 ms * 6.442 ms
9 219.158.13.2 (219.158.13.2) 8.133 ms 9.771 ms *
10 219.158.32.162 (219.158.32.162) 15.958 ms * *
11 * 202.97.48.57 (202.97.48.57) 14.692 ms *
12 * * *
13 * 220.191.135.118 (220.191.135.118) 13.930 ms *
14 220.191.196.58 (220.191.196.58) 13.257 ms 13.036 ms 13.038 ms
15 122.224.105.230 (122.224.105.230) 16.257 ms 15.036 ms 16.038 ms
16 122.224.194.180 (122.224.194.180) 18.257 ms 20.036 ms 19.038 ms

My router and my gateway do not respond to a ping even with the -w switch set to 10,000 ms. Then I get some good ms for 3 hops and then the hops go right up to 475ms or more, and this is for non-VPN and local sites like youku and 163.com. With VPN it's 300ms the whole trip of 10 hops or more.

If this were due to TGFW then trips out to local sites would be fast and anything outside would be slow, but that is not the case. For instance I cannot view videos on youku as they are just as slow as youtube, with or without VPN.

It could just be that all the students are on the internet watching PPS everyday and that the servers are overloaded -- but the cyber cafes in town are ok and your Shanghai connection is quite good.

Maybe they have broadband or DSL or cable and I have a shared FTTH that is ground to a halt. That did not happen during Spring Festival.

OK I just ran this again and got some numbers that make sense with my slow connection:
This is WITH Vpn. Note hops 2 and 3, measured in 4 seconds...

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
Tracing route to taobao.com [122.224.194.180]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 * 3840 ms 316 ms gw1.iad.witopia.net [38.119.98.193]
3 1336 ms * 4153 ms gi8-15.mpd01.iad03.atlas.cogentco.com [38.104.58
.209]
4 316 ms 317 ms 317 ms te0-2-0-7.mpd22.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.3.5]
5 317 ms 317 ms 317 ms te0-0-0-4.ccr21.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.31.105]
6 318 ms 318 ms 318 ms te0-3-0-5.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.2.49]
7 330 ms 329 ms 329 ms te7-2.ccr01.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.28.
214]
8 343 ms 344 ms 344 ms te2-1.ccr01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.
2]
9 1644 ms 2289 ms 3430 ms te9-2.ccr01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.2
37]
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * 570 ms 202.97.51.117
14 550 ms 550 ms 550 ms 202.97.35.13
15 562 ms 556 ms 557 ms 202.97.35.105
16 573 ms 574 ms 578 ms 202.97.34.214
17 589 ms 588 ms 590 ms 220.191.135.110
18 582 ms 583 ms 583 ms 220.191.196.114
19 590 ms 582 ms 1085 ms 122.224.105.230
20 2609 ms 3731 ms * 122.224.194.180
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 804 ms 559 ms 564 ms 122.224.194.180

Trace complete

God damn it. Do traceroute WITHOUT VPN, only without it you can know, if it is problem of network inside your school or major ISP problem. **********We need to see your first few hops. With VPN you basicly hide all hopes between your computer and VPN server in US (wich is ~16-18 hops).

Use this site to traceroute FROM different servers TO YOU.

linkwan.net

**********[MODERATOR - REFRAIN FROM DEROGATORY TERMS OR PERSONAL ATTACKS ON OTHER USERS]

LtSaw wrote:God damn it. Do traceroute WITHOUT VPN, only without it you can know, if it is problem of network inside your school or major ISP problem.

Saw, you're okay. Got me laughing, anyhow

No, I'm Ok, let me guess, you are on China Telecom ADSL?

No, I'm commercial. Not dsl, this is the best we could get here. About 1/3 the price of CT dsl, tho ... but I think our isp got bought and this plan is not available anymore.

Here is my traceroute on China Unicom FTTH plan:

I hate you Are you engaged to the mayor of Shanghai's daughter ? It's certainly not available to the rest of us.

jb88888 wrote:I hate you Are you engaged to the mayor of Shanghai's daughter ? It's certainly not available to the rest of us.

No. I when I came to Shanghai, I was looking an apprtment near Fudan. And I didn't know back then anything about internet here. So I checked internet options in every bulding where I was looking for flat. All the buildings had China Telecom ADSL 4-8Mbps OR China Unicom's FTTH plans 10Mbps-35Mbps. China Unicom FTTH 20Mbps plan was 210RMB/month (now it is 190RMB/month), Telecom's ADSL was 230RMB for 8Mbps. Lady from realtor company told me to chose Telecom's ADSL plan, I didn't understand why, she told me it has "better quality and speed" (as i said I didn't know anything about internet and ISPs in China), so I went with China Unicom 20Mbps plan. In the end it prooved that it is better than China Telecom ADSL. My friends who live near me always whining about slow internet in the evenings, but now they can't change their plan to Unicom because they already paid for 1 year ahead for Telecom's ADSL + there is a quoque on connecting to FTTH plans. It takes 40-70min for me to download 8Gb HD movie. They can't even watch YouTube via VPN without preloads. Feels good man.

LtSaw wrote:No. I when I came to Shanghai, I was looking an apprtment near Fudan. And I didn't know back then anything about internet here. So I checked internet options in every bulding where I was looking for flat. All the buildings had China Telecom ADSL 4-8Mbps OR China Unicom's FTTH plans 10Mbps-35Mbps. China Unicom FTTH 20Mbps plan was 210RMB/month (now it is 190RMB/month), Telecom's ADSL was 230RMB for 8Mbps. Lady from realtor company told me to chose Telecom's ADSL plan, I didn't understand why, she told me it has "better quality and speed" (as i said I didn't know anything about internet and ISPs in China), so I went with China Unicom 20Mbps plan. In the end it prooved that it is better than China Telecom ADSL. My friends who live near me always whining about slow internet in the evenings, but now they can't change their plan to Unicom because they already paid for 1 year ahead for Telecom's ADSL + there is a quoque on connecting to FTTH plans. It takes 40-70min for me to download 8Gb HD movie. They can't even watch YouTube via VPN without preloads. Feels good man.

Hey Saw!
PM me your address and I'll move to where you're at. Serious, I'm at the time of moving myself!

All your speedtest results just make me drool. What's your up speed other than 20Mb/sec down speed? And are you getting the same insane speeds every minute of the day and day in day out?

Is China Unicom's FTTH still only available in one area in Shanghai or is it widely available in Shanghai now?

Also, how is the FTTH reliability? I find that China Telecom's ADSL unreliable and speeds are very inconsistent.

Still no fix.

Non-VPN 3rd through nth Hops from my machine to various servers are 5 ms to 15 ms. The first two hops time out. So the modem and the school network server are still the bad links. They add up to 4,000 ms to each hop.

Just had the local China Unicom tech at my house to attempt a fix and he was not too helpful. He did not know basic cmd line ip tools.

Anyhow, I have been told that they are working on the network and that it will be fixed 'In 2 days.'

Of course they said that 3 weeks ago, 2 weeks ago, last week and today.

Now they are doing work on the buildings or some such and I have no internet at all. Posting from a cafe that won't permit me to install my vpn is no solution.

Perhaps this will be fixed by the end of the month for the new school year...

yunnanexpat wrote:@Coffee & Victor:

I will try to figure out which company my service is with and if its FTTB or not.

Since this slowdown commenced at the time that the school let out it is possible that the teachers and others who live on campus are also surfing PPS and such 24-7 and cutting the speed down.

What is PPS?

Porno Sites lol?

Its actually PPStream, which can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPStream

Its a gigantic p2p video streaming network inside the mainland, and it literally eats bandwidth, this thing is probably not very well designed and can grind any network to a halt. This includes normal BT ADSL in UK. Just be damn sure that those 'students' especially the female ones, are watching this all day... Well, nothing you can do about it until school's back on.

braincracking wrote:Its actually PPStream, which can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPStream

Its a gigantic p2p video streaming network inside the mainland, and it literally eats bandwidth, this thing is probably not very well designed and can grind any network to a halt. This includes normal BT ADSL in UK. Just be damn sure that those 'students' especially the female ones, are watching this all day... Well, nothing you can do about it until school's back on.

Well, school CAN do few easy steps to end this kind of ****. All you need to do, is add to blacklist few most popular BT trackers that chinese use (I don't think there are more then 10-20 in China) + set NAT to Secure. Problem solved.

yunnanexpat,

From your description of the network environment, it is quite difficult to determine the exact root cause of the problem. There are too many factors which are out of your control. I don't know if you have access to the main modem or core switch, but this is where to start, before it gets distributed with the other 2000+ users on campus. You eliminate the "entire network" variable and you can test if the main line is problematic since you are the only user. Do this with the China Unicom guy if possible.
Then you can continue diagnosis; identify what is in your control (the route to the core switch) and what is not (exisiting infrastructure and other users eating bandwidth)

LtSaw wrote:Well, school CAN do few easy steps to end this kind of ****. All you need to do, is add to blacklist few most popular BT trackers that chinese use (I don't think there are more then 10-20 in China) + set NAT to Secure. Problem solved.

My friend, if it were only that easy. I've configured servers and systems in my spare time and BT is the scum of all. The Chinese love their eMule ed2k and XunLei BT(Thunder) and this really eats all the bandwidth at schools or hotels. Even if you blacklist trackers - p2p clients intershare through modules such as DHT.
Even if you think you can outsmart the TCP calls or UDP broadcast, they even randomly switch ports. The NAT secure feature doesn't really work.
The only way is to set rigid quotas on TCP and UDP per user IP and that takes network planning on the DHCP subnet.
Some local Chinese are also using private trackers (even international ones) to do their BT announcement urls.
In summary, its this constant battle between the P2P software programmers, the compatibility with networking hardware and protocol and the system admins who are trying to limit your software capability to ensure "fair usage"

peace

mochabene wrote:yunnanexpat,

From your description of the network environment, it is quite difficult to determine the exact root cause of the problem. There are too many factors which are out of your control. I don't know if you have access to the main modem or core switch, but this is where to start, before it gets distributed with the other 2000+ users on campus. You eliminate the "entire network" variable and you can test if the main line is problematic since you are the only user. Do this with the China Unicom guy if possible.
Then you can continue diagnosis; identify what is in your control (the route to the core switch) and what is not (exisiting infrastructure and other users eating bandwidth)

LtSaw wrote:Well, school CAN do few easy steps to end this kind of ****. All you need to do, is add to blacklist few most popular BT trackers that chinese use (I don't think there are more then 10-20 in China) + set NAT to Secure. Problem solved.

My friend, if it were only that easy. I've configured servers and systems in my spare time and BT is the scum of all. The Chinese love their eMule ed2k and XunLei BT(Thunder) and this really eats all the bandwidth at schools or hotels. Even if you blacklist trackers - p2p clients intershare through modules such as DHT.
Even if you think you can outsmart the TCP calls or UDP broadcast, they even randomly switch ports. The NAT secure feature doesn't really work.
The only way is to set rigid quotas on TCP and UDP per user IP and that takes network planning on the DHCP subnet.
Some local Chinese are also using private trackers (even international ones) to do their BT announcement urls.
In summary, its this constant battle between the P2P software programmers, the compatibility with networking hardware and protocol and the system admins who are trying to limit your software capability to ensure "fair usage"

peace

Well, they use some **** up p2p protocols. + as far as I know China Telecom network is masively overloaded. For example my speed at evenings drop vary rarely, from 25Mbps to 15-11Mbps. But friends who use China Telecom, who live accross the street say that internet is almost unusable after 6PM and before 11PM.

Anyway the only problem I see is only in "fair use" policy of chinese ISPs. In Russia for example ISP can't provide service to clients, if this ISP don't have at least 25% of bandwith advantage of o total maximum bandwith consumed by it's clients.

Let's take Beeline for example. They standart speed plans are 10, 20, 35, 55 and 75Mbps. And if they have for example 60 clients in 1 building, whos total bandwith is ~675Mbps, they (ISP) should have at least 675Mbps + 675Mbps*0.25 line for that building by the law.


But I think if they accept same policy in China no one will be allowed to use more then 256Kbps.

Also why shouldn't try to force school to block few trackers? Not all chinese are smart enough to use oversea trackers and DHT sometimes disabled anyway. It may be not solve the problem, but at least give 15-30% bandwith boost.

Pardon my silly question but how one use DHT and overseas tracker?
My internet is so sucky that it cant access hotmail but I still wish to run bittorrent if possible.