[mobutu]

On this note, we've been trying to upload gigabytes of data via rsync from Europe to China (we are software company who are trying to deliver tools to our Chinese customers..). Connection used to be fast when it was night time in China, but lately the connection has been really slow or unusable. Is there any alternative way to get lots of packages from Western countries to China?

[halfelf]

If this happens day to day, you may consider opening a subsidiary in China, with applying for special network. Foreign company in China can have network without GFW.

[est]

There's no "special network", it's just plan old VPN.

[qhwa]

The recent congestion is caused by the price reducing of ISPs demanded by the government. A lot of customers upgraded their bandwidth without paying additional money. This makes the already busy cables out of bandwidth.

Back to your question, the answer is YES, use a proxy, which is less expensive, or buy a dedicated private virtual line from a Chinese ISP, which is more stable.

You can setup a fast proxy by carefully selecting the routing path. Nowadays, the CN2 cable (http://www.ctamericas.com/content.asp?pl=627&sl=637&contenti...) is a good choice.

[gnur]

Ship it on an usb drive. (use encryption)

[JonnyGreenwood]

And get confiscated by China customs..

[M2Ys4U]

The latency with that method is going to suck, though.

[xiaq]

Somewhat anecdotal, but try IPv6.

[finalink]

Copy it to an AWS EC2 Japan server, and copy it to China from Japan. I have transferred 1T data from Europe to China with this method.

[mobutu]

Why Japan (as a location) is special? GFW does not affect traffic from Japan that much?

[qhwa]

It's also effected by GFW. Some Japanese IDCs connect China through CN2 cable which is not so busy right now.

[kinosang]

Use Chinese CDN (such as Upyun, Baidu CDN, Qiniu and Aliyun) for http file downloading (with a subdomain provided by the CDN or you'll need to apply permissions at MIIT as ICP) instead of rsync or ssh tunnel. Or rsync your data to Japanese Servers (Linode, GMO, etc) and ask your customers to download through http or https.

[mobutu]

The problem is to upload data to China, we are not downloading anything from there.

"Or rsync your data to Japanese Servers (Linode, GMO, etc) and ask your customers to download through http or https."

We've used Amazon CDN before even for Chinese customers and they have closest node in Hong Kong - they still(Chinese) have difficulties to download our packages. I doubt using Japanese server would solve our problem. Thanks anyway.

[kinosang]

CloudFront, the CDN from Amazon, have already been blocked by the GFW. But you can use CloudFlare or Baidu's CDN, etc.

[mrredbit]

Due to political reason, I think Chinese gov seriously and actively censor package from Hong Kong

[hipaulshi]

setup a server with aliyun. the cloud service provider from alibaba. And relay the traffic from there.

[mobutu]

Funny you mention it, we are actually uploading to the server in Aliyun cloud services. Completely unusable :(

[hipaulshi]

lol.. I would have thought they have the fastest data center.

[mobutu]

It probably is _inside_ China. :)