International access to the Internet from Beijing has been poor since January 1, and seems to have gotten worse, likely due to folks returning from vacation and swamping existing links. Some friends mentioned that access to their corporate VPNs routed over the public Internet were virtually unusable from Beijing.

Google Mail is inaccessible half the time, or runs too slow to function. Skype is largely unusable. Downloading podcasts takes half a dozen tries through Apple iTunes, requiring a few different VPNs and SSH tunnels. I feel like I’m in the Internet Gulag.

Performance tends to be better in the early morning. I got a few hours of zippy performance from 4:30 am on, but by 7:00 am, the net was slowing again.

AFP reports that it’s going to take some more time “until late January” to get things fixed. But you have to wonder if this will wake up China’s broadband providers to provide more capacity and redundancy, as corporate customers cannot be happy with the state of affairs.

During the Olympics, the news media and businesses will be using the Internet in all kinds of exotic ways that will make today’s bandwidth look laughably inadequate. Better start upgrading now.