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.

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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