[seanmcdirmid]

I lived in China for 9 years and always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow. Like sure you have 5G, but the overall internet trunks are just saturated and not built out enough. Maybe it has gotten better since I left Beijing in 2016?

It was definitely cheap and affordable. But I always felt a huge speed bump (along with easy access to foreign web sites) when I went to Thailand or Indonesia for vacation.

[alephnerd]

> always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow

A lot of that is because of the GFW.

MITM/TLS decryption/DPI has a massive performance overhead (and why the first question any agent based security product is ask is whether it is "in the path of traffic").

It's basically a giant version of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)

The performance hit is a major reason why a lot of edge computing development has happened in the Chinese ecosystem (you can't guarantee stuff works with latency, so how do you solve that)

This is an older investigation (2017) by ThousandEyes about this - https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/benchmarking-network-perfo...

Note that the infra has changed drastically since 2017.

[seanmcdirmid]

Hmm, then I’m not even sure why they bother with lines out anymore. They’ve blocked pretty much everything abroad, it seems like they could speed things up by just scrapping the GFW and physically disconnecting their internet from the rest of the world.

[alephnerd]

> it seems like they could speed things up by just scrapping the GFW and physically disconnecting their internet from the rest of the world

If you do that, international commerce for China grinds to a complete halt (though ik one very large F50 that is in the process of completely decoupling in the next 2 years)

Especially because this kind of an en masse disconnection means completely disconnecting Chinese assets abroad from their mainland HQs.

Down the grapevine, I have heard some provinces testing that kind of a whitelist, but I'm not sure how true that is.

If an actual nationwide whitelist is implemented, I think that is proof enough that war be coming. Even Roskomnadzor didn't try implementing a similar system until the 2022 escalation.

[seanmcdirmid]

That makes sense, but at least China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed.

It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh. Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason.

[alephnerd]

> Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason

That's because when your SIM is in international roaming, traffic is routed by the local telco to a tunnel back to the home telco provider. This ofc decreases margins significantly (because those bytes are routed via fiber or satellite by a Transit Service) and is why roaming costs are so high.

> It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh

Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.

> China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed

Not really. As an individual you are definetly paying a performance cost in the form of low latencies and speeds, but this is also why edge computing solutions (eg. Compute offloading, packet size optimizations, etc) are heavily researched by Chinese players compared to Western players. In isolation, it's a good forcing function for innovation.

That said, it is absolutely 1984-esque.

Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.

It's bad for business, but China (and especially Xi) has seemed to have taken a very statist approach after the 2015-16 financial crisis.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.

We hosted an ACM conference in 2011 in Beijing. One of my friends came, first trip to China, really smart guy just finishing up his PhD in EECS at UCB, but OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard. Lots of people will tell you China is just a normal tourist spot like Japan, Thailand, or Indonesia, but it really isn't.

> Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.

I was in Beijing for those. A lot of things blocked afterwards, we slowly lost more services that we had previously. I would say 2008 was a peak for Chinese internet liberalization (and well, lots of other liberalization, I also spent 6 months in 2002 so can compare), and then it just tanked from that point on to present. They made a show for the Olympics and then decided they didn't need to bother anymore. It doesn't help that Xi is much more assertive and autocratic than Hu was.

[wzyboy]

> I lived in China for 9 years and always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow.

Did you have your VPN / proxy on? That might be one of the reason as Chinese internet is only fast for traffic within its borders. Traffic that crosses borders are super slow in terms of throughput AND latency (if not blocked altogether). If you have your VPN / proxy on, your request basically crosses the borders twice before it reaches the destination web server.

Another reason I can think of is the mobile ISP incompatibility. For some ridiculous reasons, most "foreign" phones' (iPhones exempt) do not have full radio coverage when connected to CMCC.

[seanmcdirmid]

We tried many VPNs, and they all would stop working after paying for the mandatory few months, so I eventually gave up. IT is slow inside China even without using a VPN, and only accessing domestic Chinese websites (well, if you don't have YouTube, at least you have tons of pirated content to view).

This is with a wired line from China Telecom, China Unicom internet is fine for text viewing, I don't I bothered much with video (and really, it is slower than China Mobile 5G, I guess this has changed now).