Archive for January, 2007

Internet in China Post-earthquake

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

After getting back to China on New Year’s Day, I noticed that the Internet connections have not come back as quickly as those in Singapore. After two days of spotty connections in the city-state, the net was largely back to very quick speeds. But here in Beijing, there are still many quirks.

In many cases, “triangle” routing seems to work better than direct connections. That is, using a VPN to a server in the US to redirect traffic often gave higher throughput than direct contact with sites.

For example, downloading Apple’s 10.4.8 OS update, at around 28 Mbytes:

Direct connection from China Netcom (CNC) DSL to Apple.com : 58 minutes
“Triangle routed” from CNC to VPN in US to Apple.com : 15 minutes

This could be due to any number of factors: the interconnection of CNC with the VPN provider might be better than that of CNC to Apple.com directly. This is likely the case. Another example of triangle routing doing better — Google Mail is extremely slow to access directly from CNC. But if I use a VPN or SSH tunnel, it is much faster.

But I also do wonder if certain chokepoints of the Great Firewall are affected by increased traffic suddenly being funneled through systems that weren’t designed for so much load. In that case, would the opaque encrypted VPN packets be shuttled across the GFW interface faster than transparent FTP or HTTP packets? Since it makes no sense to inspect an strongly encrypted packet, it may get passed along with less hassle. And since the GFW system works on filtering cleartext streams, might some outside connections be throttled?

One bright spot: I have good enough packet throughput to do a Skype videoconference with folks in Singapore. The video was not frivilous, as I visually instructed my 10-year old niece how to connect a new Canon photo printer to their PC. It was much easier to show her the USB A-to-B cable on video, than to describe it by phone. Chalk one up for videoconferencing.