CHAPTER 1: Why your internet is slow in China
Let's start from the beginning
Before we dive into the reasons why your internet is so slow in China, let’s talk about how the internet actually works.
Unless you’re a network engineer, chances are your knowledge of internet infrastructure is pretty hazy. A shrug and an incantation of the words “science” works most of the time, but that won’t cut it here. We’ll have to go a bit deeper.
Let’s start with this:
What we call the internet is actually just a giant collection of wires and servers relaying light and electrical signals all over the place.
The internet isn’t the collective delusion of humanity or mystical brain waves emanating from a hivemind of tech billionaires. It’s basically the same thing as calling somebody long distance over phone lines, but just a million times better and faster.
These wires and servers are owned and maintained by different companies all over the place. And if you want to exchange information over their network, then you have to pay. In the same way that you pay an internet provider for internet service, internet providers pay each other to connect their services.
It’s a concept called network peering, and it’s the key to understanding why your internet in China is slower than 狗屎.A quick lesson in peering
When you send a request to see a foreign website from inside China, it travels across the network of your local ISP (e.g. China Telecom), and then has to travel across a series of undersea cables to a network on the other side (e.g. NTTDoCoMo, Verizon, Google).
It’s a fairly tangled web of connections between internet providers and networks. Have a look at the map below to see what we mean:
What’s most important is that moment when your Chinese ISP hands off your request. That moment when information starts going through undersea cables and traveling on connections outside of China is when a deal is made based on price and service quality. And of course, the higher price you pay, the better your speed and service.
So what kind of network peering options are out there? And how do you choose?
Peering options in China
While your specific peering options in China depend on where you are and which ISP you use, there are only three main ones to choose from.
The first and most widely used peering option is ChinaNet Assess (AS4134), often called 163 Net. This peering network offers the most connections within China and the greatest bandwidth of all the options.
This makes 163 Net sound awesome, but being big and widely available means that everyone is on it. And in a country with over 800 million internet users, that’s a lot of people. So much so that connecting to any foreign website via 163 Net tends to creep along no matter what you do, regardless of how shithot your VPN’s encryption is or what foreign server you are using.
Your other two available peering options are part of the China Telecom Next Generation Carrier Network (AS4809), also known as CN2. This separate peering option was created with greater efficiency and exclusivity in mind.
The basic CN2 option is called CN2-Global Transit (CN2-GT). This option costs more to use than 163 Net, but provides significantly better service and speed by ensuring less congestion across the network with a transmission utilization ratio under 50%. In plain English, that means that the network is only used to transmit information half of the time . The rest of the time, it’s ready and waiting.
And while CN2-GT is already a significant step up from 163 Net, there’s an even faster option called CN2-Global Internet Access (CN2-GIA). Here you get even more dedicated service and better speed than CN2-GT, but it costs 3x the price. If you have the network geek chops (or get really excited about networks), you can delve deeper into each of these peering options with our friends over at Data Plugs.
The question remains: how are all these peering options shared? Is it all based on the free market? (Ha.) Or is there something else driving this?
How China handles peering
You’re probably tired of hearing it, but we’re going to have to say it again. China is a developing country. And as such the entire country has been playing catch-up in terms of everything from train stations to toilets. (And toilets in train stations, too!)
The internet is no exception. In this case, the central planners in China focused on building internet access that was cheap and plentiful, not necessarily fast and reliable.
For peering, that means that 163 Net ends up being the default for everyone. All 800 million plus internet users in China basically go through the same route when they want to access any foreign website.
So even if you want to load a plain vanilla, non-sensitive foreign website like tesla.com or nyse.com, you’ll be trying to connect with everyone else in China to access information. At peak times, things will get sludge-yyy.
To top that off, one company dominants all of these network connectivity arrangements—China Telecom. Call it a leftover of China’s state-run economy or a way to keep central control of the internet for political reasons. Either way, that means that China’s two other major internet carriers, China Unicom and China Mobile, have fended for themselves by setting up small (and slower!) peering arrangements directly with external ISP providers. So choosing a different ISP in China really won’t help very much, regardless of how fast they say download speeds on their network are.
A bit of good news came in 2020 though, as regulators forced China Telecom to open up their network to China Mobile and China Unicom. But don’t expect these changes to make a huge difference any time soon.
So what can you do? Is it possible for a laowai like you to get on a faster peering plan like CN2-GT or CN2-GIA?
Can you get better peering China?
Here’s the deal.
It is possible to get better peering, but not directly. China Telecom only offers “VIP” CN2-GT and CN2-GIA peering to companies, government institutions, or those with the right connections (pardon the pun). In previous years, China Telecom also offered “VIP” or "国际精品网" subscriptions to regular consumers as well for only 50RMB! As you can imagine, it was quickly oversubscribed, and the price raised to the staggering price of...150RMB! Finally, it was discontinued to consumers altogether in 2016.
And because these prices are focused on institutions and companies, the prices are too. Hooray for capitalism! Or is it communism with Chinese characteristics? Regardless, you have to pay.
There is one solution though. You could start your own company, buy bandwidth on these peering networks and share/resell it to your friends. You’ll get real speeds internationally up 500Mbps and you won’t have to compete with all of China to access foreign networks.
That’s exactly what we did at Chinanetspeed. Or you can just start your own company. It’s up to you. Good luck with the fapiao. :p
A truth of inconvenience
Sometimes internet issues in China aren’t a question of congestion or speed. Sometimes it’s just not possible to access the internet at all. Period. No matter of peering or VPNing will get you any closer to checking Facebook.
There’s one obvious culprit behind much of this, but we won’t say their name out loud, lest they keep us from chatting with you. 你懂得。
But you might be surprised to learn that there are a number of reasons why connections in China just grind to a halt.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
Choke points by design
Besides affordability and accessibility, national security is also a major consideration in the design of the Chinese internet. All foriegn traffic is routed through three choke points in Shanghai, Guangdong, and Qingdao.
These bottlenecks make it easy to shut off connections between Mainland China and the rest of the world, in case of a massive cyberattack or political threats or, well, just because. And even if the authorities aren’t shutting things down, these limited exchange points between China and the rest of the world make access to foreign websites slow or just flat out fail.
To use an analogy that you’re probably all too familiar with, imagine touching down at a busy international airport and going through immigration with just three officers on duty. If there’s a surge in passengers, things can easily grind to a halt.
And if one of the officers decides to take a bathroom break?
Agony.
Old Network Infrastructure
While direct fiber optic connections are everywhere in more developed “Tier 1” cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, rural areas in China may rely on telephone lines to provide internet access through DSL technology. China does have an urban/rural divide in terms of internet infrastructure similar to the type you’d find in the US.
That said, even in more developed areas of China, connections in older buildings and residential compounds can have substandard connections set up by telephone company repair workers decades ago, long before the internet became what it is today. These folks weren’t trained as network engineers, so their solutions to connectivity problems tended to be “creative”.
The reason your internet might stop working all of sudden could be that ungodly mass of telephone cables in the dingy closet in your lobby. It’s not censorship. Just bad wiring.
People, Lots of People
Ah, yes. “Too many people.” It’s a classic explanation for a lot of issues in China. And it’s especially true for the internet.
During the evening rush, when everyone’s hanging out at home watching shows or scrolling away on their phones, networks can easily get overwhelmed and connections drop. Luckily, there are major plans in the works to make Chinese network infrastructure people-proof.
In 2020, the Chinese government had this to say in its 14th Five-Year Plan:
Coordinating promotion of infrastructure construction. We will: Build modern infrastructure systems that are complete, efficient, practical, smart, green, safe and reliable; systematically lay out new infrastructure, and accelerate construction of 5G communications, the industrial internet, big data centers, and other facilities
(From 14th Five Year Plan as translated by Georgetown’s CSET)
Five year plans are a big deal in China. They read a bit like a list of promises to the Chinese people and fulfilling them is a top priority for the people in charge. So there’s good reason to believe that things will get better soon on this front.
Your Equipment Sucks
When you set up your internet did you just use whatever equipment that your internet service provider gave you? If so, you might have trouble connecting because of crappy equipment.
Typically, when you sign up for internet service in China a technician (“your internet shifu”) comes and installs an internet gateway in your home which combines the functions of both a modem and a wifi router.
A quick refresher: a modem is the device that communicates with the server of your internet service provider, while the wifi router is the thing that relays information from your modem to your computer, tablet, smartphone or whathaveyou. A gateway is a combination of both.
The gateways provided by Chinese internet service providers work, but they aren’t great, especially the wifi router component. That bit is pretty sucky. And if pushed, even your internet shifu will admit as much.
Why the cheap equipment? Again, it’s all part of China’s mission to make the internet affordable for everybody.
So if you have trouble getting a strong wifi signal in your house, you’ll probably need to upgrade your wifi router. We’ve put together an article on the best wifi routers in China, but the most important feature to pay attention to is whether your router is 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz.
While 2.4Ghz routers have a longer range, they carry less information. Plus, the 2.4Ghz band is a crowded frequency used by lots of wireless devices, so your internet signal is going to be battling noise.
A 5Ghz carries a lot more information over a less-used frequency. The only downside is that it doesn’t travel through walls very well. If you are living in an apartment with concrete walls (and the chances are good that you are), you might need to purchase range extenders to boost the signal in certain parts of your home.
Undersea Cables Break
And finally, let’s not forget that when you connect to foreign websites, your information is traveling around the world over thousands of miles on undersea cables. Sometimes these cables get damaged or break.
This really does happen more frequently than you think. Here’s a snippet reporting an outage on March 5, 2021:
Elsewhere, a cable fault has been reported on the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) cable system, with the damage affecting Segment 4, which connects Chongming Island (China) and Tamsui (Taiwan). The 17,968km TPE fibre-optic system links Japan with mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan and the US. The system is operated by a consortium comprising NTT Communications, AT&T, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chungwha Telecom, KT Corp and Verizon.
If that happens, you’re kinda screwed until things get patched up. No amount of VPN wrangling will save you.
In fact, as we’ll soon see, there are real limits to what your VPN can and can’t do for your internet in China.
