Job Discussion Forums

[SpedEd]

So here goes: I have a straightforward question for the ESL community in China. Why is the Internet in China apparently broken? I surmise there are many millions of PC users logged into (or trying) the Net over here but the bandwidth situation is the worst - ever. I *know* that I got faster webpage load times using AOL dialup many years ago now. So, is it the feds filtering the english webpage content or does the answer lie somewhere on the hardware end? This is a work related query.

[senorfay]

Are you daft?! There's a thing called the Great Firewall in action here! For the last few days security has gone way up. The Internet here is slow, but lately it's been much slower. You're not the only one experiencing the slowness and the blockade. All of us who use the latin or cyrillic or arabic alphabets have been affected.

There are few ways around it. If you want things unblocked, go to proxies, but even the proxies haven't been working so well lately. As you may know, the proxies slow things down even more.

[bearcanada]

If the security checks have increased, they are sporadic. I have noticed a huge slowdown in page access (and many pages that don't load, or don't load properly), but that seems to occur only at some times of the day. The location of websites or content of pages doesn't seem to affect the speeds.

There are other periods each day when downloads are very fast, much higher than I would expect from DSL. Late last night I downloaded a program file of 22 Mb, and I was seeing a download speed of 240 Mbits per second.

Yesterday morning I had great difficulty in loading any pages on Dave's, but today it seems fine. The problems may be structural rather than interference from the authorities. That's my guess.

.

[Mr. Kalgukshi]

Please see earlier active thread running on the topic on the China O/T forum.