The conditions

Over here the DSL is very fast connecting to local (China) websites. But to internationally websites, it's nearly impossible to get through. That's why I complained about that writing China DSL too slow.

Not only slow, China blocks almost anything in English. Seriously, WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr. What else that's famous in US and the whole world, is not blocked by China Firewall. They even blocked Facebook for some time.

Poor DNS is also a big problem in China and Vietnam. My own website is "address not found". At first I thought binh.name is blocked, and I was thinking "Why? Did I do anything against China?". Then when I changed the DNS to 203.12.160.35 I realized it's just China ISP has really poor DNS server that doesn't even know half of the World Wide Web. Same thing happened in Vietnam, too.

First attempts

Web proxy

I've been trying with different type of free web proxies. Those worked at first, but slowly the China Firewall start to block all the good ones. Other than that, they are displaying too much advertisement that obstruct my view.

USA-VPN.com

I once used USA-VPN.com for nearly a month. I was very satisfied with that VPN service while I was in China, when it worked really faster than normal DSL connection. And the pricing was really cheap, only $5/month pay by online money.

But it failed me when I came to Vietnam... totally not working at all.

Decision - Strong VPN

I've been suffering this problem for 2 year until now, when I decide to spend money and pay for a VPN solution. Strong VPN made my life better. Do you want to know more about VPN? See this Wikipedia VPN definition.

Pricing

Strong VPN is not cheap at the price of $15/month. A normal web hosting only charge $6/month. However, not facing financial loss of not being able to connect, is priceless. So as long as of my concern, Strong VPN is inexpensive.

Usage

I'm not using Strong VPN just in China, but also in Vietnam. For some reasons, the connection here also not so good to International sites. And I believe, as long as I have money to pay for Strong VPN, I will keep using the service as far as I go and whenever I need.

Advantages

There are 5 main advantages of Strong VPN in comparison with the previous services I used:

1. It has American IP. Perhaps this is the reason why I got through when the normal connection could not. So that's it's unblocked. Most of the time when I am stuck, I use Strong VPN to unblock it
2. It has multiple servers. At first attempt I failed to connect. After testing all the server I found out the vpn-in1 is the fastest, then I used it. For other people it maybe different server though.
3. It has lighting fast support. I got difficulty at first tries, and when I got on to the Live Support, I was surprise each time I got through in just < 1 minute. Even in the middle of the US night, or at US day time, they are still there to help.
4. It's easy to connect. Just a single click from the start menu, I got connected to Strong VPN. The initial VPN setup is straight forward too.
5. It takes Paypal. It was really hard for me to find a VPN that accepts PayPal. Strong VPN really saves me with this. Many VPN services only take other e-money that cost me a lot if I have to buy those currency.

Disadvantages

Life is like that, always there are things to be complained about. Especially it's me, the critics guy. There are also 5 disadvantages of Strong VPN, namely:

1. First attempt didn't work. The assigned me a server that I could not connect to. I freaked out and had to chat with their live-support immediately.
2. No automatic fast server assignment. With so many servers available, they could make a software to assign new users to the fastest connection automatically based on user IP.
3. No server comparisons. They have the speed test, but I'd preferred those test be done on one page instead of making so many clicks. I had to spend over 2 hours just to open and close the pages. So hard to note down the speed.
4. High monthly fee. The pricing for VPN as general is around $15 nowadays. For me that's very high because hosting only cost me $5/month, domain $10/year.
5. High setup fee. I was really freaked out at this, too. They charge $20 installation fee if I prepay less than 3 months. So I had to pay $45 for first 3 months, to get the $20 waved.

Recommendations

I never thought about paying that much for a VPN server just to connect to the US sites. But since I'm making a decent amount of money online, that cost is minimal compare to what VPN brings me.

If you face the same or similar problem I'm facing, I suggest you try Strong VPN. I'm trying it out for 3 months. If it still works as it is right now, I will keep using it for longer.

If you find out a better VPN solution, please share it with me. Thanks in advance.

Finally I got the time and motivation to follow up on a post earlier called China Internet Speed too Slow or Just DSL Slow? . Thanks to Alex, a visitor who left a question on that post. You will find in this articles:

• Why is it slow?
• How to make it faster?

Update: I got a better solution: VPN Solution (click to read more).

Why is it slow?

Why broadband in China too slow? The reason... bottleneck at the trunk line to International Websites, especially to America. I found my own IP is located in Bejing while I'm staying in ZhongShan, which is thousands of km away from Bejing. Far enough to say... "too far".

I have been wondering this in mind "Why is it so slow" when surfing international websites in Vietnam and China. I had an Australia proxy, which generally give me full speed access to those sites, but with no proxy, the connection is terrible.

Then one day, while searching for "Australian Proxy", I stumbled upon this page: Australia Proxy for those having connection problems by Reaper-X. From that page, I realized why the Internet speed is so slow when connecting to most international web sites.

The recent connection problem in Asia region is caused by recent earthquake in Taiwan, as Reaper-X pointed out. As much as I know, the earthquakes also destroyed many undersea fiber optic cables in Vietnam, causing a bottleneck for the Internet traffic going in from and out to Website hosted outside the country.

A visitor, Alex raised the issue up again, and this time his connection is ADSL. So basically, what I learn is that not only DSL is too slow, but also ADSL is too slow. In this case, Alex has a 3MB ADSL plan and he is complaining about the speed.

I've been complaining about this too much, and now I have to accept the only one solution to it. Why? Even the 3MB ADSL have the same problem, what can my little 512Kb DSL do? Unfortunate enough, The 4MB plan I mentioned earlier isn't available in my area.

How to make it faster?

The only fix available for me now is to use Australian proxies.

I've been using one Australian proxy 165.228.131.12:80. If you don't know what it mean then here is the breakdown:

• IP address: 165.228.131.12
• Port number: 80

The proxies that work

For as long as I can remember, that was the only proxy that worked for me. I've tested too many and none of them worked. Until recently after reading Reaper-X article, I found 3 more proxies which do work:

1. 165.228.128.10:3128
2. 165.228.130.10:3128
3. 165.228.132.10:3128

Testing the proxies

I test those proxies against Lorelle's "Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Internet Access" and here are the results:

Winner of the test: proxy 165.228.132.10:3128

Interesting facts

• In fact, without using proxies I can only open Google.com.
• With proxies, Google.com will block my IP and ask for entering confirmation code.
• Google come up slower when proxy is used.

How to use proxy

On Internet Explorer:

1. Open Tools menu > Internet Options;
2. Open Connections tab > LAN settings (near bottom of the dialog box);
3. Look for proxy server, enable the "Use proxy server for LAN";
4. Enter the IP Address and port number there;
5. Click "Advanced" button, enter google.com into the exception list.

On FireFox:

1. Open Tools menu> Options... ;
2. Open Advanced tab > Network tab > Connection group > Settings... button;
3. In "Connection Settings" form, select "Manual proxy configuration";
4. Enter the proxy IP address into HTTP Proxy box, and port number in to port box.
5. Enter google.com into the "No proxy for" box.

Caution: to avoid all the trouble, remember to bypass proxy for google.com.

What's next

Update: I got a better solution: Strong VPN (click to read more).

I hope the solution here fix your problems with the slow internet speed in China. Every visitor to my website is valuable and the motivation for me to continue providing quality articles.

If you have same problem. If you find this article help. If you need some more information. If anything, please feel free to contact me by sending me an email, or leave a comment here and I will attempt to follow up immediately.

Problem no.1: Slow Internet Speed

The worst thing ever happen to me. The area where I stay now is next to Zhuhai, but unfortunately inside Zhongshan's authority. In other words, I'm living inside Zhongshan, but 1.5 hours drive to Zhongshan city center, while Zhuhai is right there few km away but got a checkpoint.

Perhaps too far from the City center, my area only have DSL line of 512Kbps. Few days ago I tried to get a ADSL 4Mbps, which was really promising, until I got notified that they couldn't connect it. What worse can it be, not able to access your own blog to post new entries.

This problem also cause me to have so much difficulty in managing the plugin and stuff.

I am learning a lot everyday by reading the senior blogger's advices. But this thing bugging me not able to load their heavy blog pages. Regarding this, I think bloggers should seriously read more about page optimization for dial-up users. In fact I'm applying the very simple rule: keep it plain simple stupid for the sake of readers.

Problem no. 2: Tools Stripped off

Yes, the CiaDoor attack forced me to reinstall Windows. It was not the virus itself which damage so much, but the malformed F-Secure Anti-Virus broke my whole operating system.

Enough for the causes, the effect is a bit amazingly disturbing. I had to reinstall:

• office suite,
• graphic suite,
• HTML editor,
• Apache server,
• A lot more, which can cover a few pages just for listing.

Then it come to even more disturbance, when it's time for settings. I then had to do a lot more, including:

• Reconfigure windows
• Tweak windows
• Enable commonly used features
• Disable unused annoying features
• Configure the web server
• etc.

And yet, till now I haven't configured my webserver properly to test my WordPress powered blog. For safety, and speed reason, I need to test out the new plugins and themes on my local computer, otherwise we know how messy it could get.

Since I'm a computer technician myself, these tasks are just a breeve. But being busy learning to blog the right way, I'm just feel annoyed to be distracted by something so unexpected.

Conclusion, not?

Often people ignore very important factors around a successful blog/website: Internet access and good computing equipment.

From these two problems I'm facing right now, I know how valuable those resources are. We just can't create profitable blog or website without having a good Internet connection and a fast computer.

So, shouldn't we take into account the cost for Internet access and computer equipments as expenditure for our online business? I think these are somethings to take into account when calculating our profit.

Would you like to share some difficult times you on your side? What do you think about the two items I talked about and their relation to our online world?

Update: Now I get faster and unblocked with Strong VPN Solution (click to read more).

The place I'm in currently in is the border of Zhongshan and Zhuhai. Zhuhai is a city near in mainland China that's right next to Macau and close to HongKong. The speed is noticeably slow at peak times, like noon and evening. I could only surf the Internet at an acceptable speed while using an Australian proxy at time between midnight till morning.

At first I was blaming China for not having stable speed. Then yesterday I found out in January someone also said "China Internet Still Terribly Slow":

The Internet in China is still at snail speed and for some weird reason it gets worse in the evening.

Is everybody trying to play games after 18:00? Is the available bandwidth less in the evening to cut cost for China Telecom’s use of satellite back ups or is there another explanation for this?

Then today when I signed up for a new Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) plan, I realized actually I was using Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) which cause the problem. When I signed up for new broadband I had to make sure they tick the ADSL option (;).

Anyone should know that DSL is a bad out-dated choice for broadband. DSL speed varies from 128Kbps up to 9Mbps. The max speed look so nice (9Mbps) but actually it's not that fast.

The bandwidth for one DSL trunk line is divided by the number of people who share the same line, just like a LAN-to-LAN line. So what happen here is that at peak time, too many people surf the Internet at the same time, so the line become bottleneck, and the speed become slower than dial-up.

The problem didn't just end there, I'm surfing mostly American hosted websites, while the rest surf their China based sites (.cn). The .cn traffic sure get priority compare to others, so my own web requests get delayed, delayed, and delayed... till the browser display time-out message.

Well, I guess the good news is that the new ADSL line is 4Mbps. There is a 2Mbps option but it's so ridiculous that the monthly price is the same as the 4M.

• 4Mbps: RMB 150/month + RMB 300 one time setup.
• 2Mbps: RMB 150/month + RMB 200 one time setup.
• 512Kbps: RMB 80/month + some cost I don't care.

I felt like being lucky for the speed checkup. China Telecom notify I could get the 4Mbps and they will come to setup at 4pm tomorrow.

Update: I got a solution for slow Internet in China here Strong VPN.

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