Internet Connectivity in Guilin, China — Great China Firewall, plus engineering & capacity issues

I'm in Guilin China for the Connect 2007 Asia conference.  I've got the Tor bundle (Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia) installed on my laptop so I can get around the Great China Firewall (GCF) and that works well.  Tor starts up automatically when my PC starts, but I only use it for browsing (by clicking the Tor button for Firefox) if I can't reach a site directly.  Yes, it's noticeably slower going through Tor, but it always works.  For example, just now, seeking the URLs to paste in about the GCF, I could get Rebecca MacKinnon's post directly, but timed out on this from Gigaom.  I clicked the Tor button, hit retry and the Gigaom post loaded.  So, the Tor bundle is a good setup which I highly recommend if you are traveling to China.

The bigger problem for me at the moment is basic throughput.  The Sheraton Hotel Guilin (where the conference is being held) has wired Internet connectivity in the rooms for 50 Yuan ($6.65) per day and free WiFi in the lobby, but only WiFi from China Mobile (CMCC) in the conference area (100 Yuan per day through the hotel business center for those of us without a China Mobile phone number).

Performance is roughly equivalent for all three connections.  Early in the morning or late at night (perhaps during the night, but I do have to sleep sometime), everything works well.  It's not the blazing speed I sometimes see in Beijing, but it works. Here are the results in my room at 7:37am against a server in Shenzhen (300 miles away):

and here's a test against a server in Los Angeles:

Unfortunately, by 10am things begin to slow down and by noon yesterday, I was seeing greater than 50% packet loss and it became impossible to blog the conference live.  I was using the China Mobile WiFi but going up to my room didn't help.

My guess:  There's a significant capacity problem between Guilin and the rest of China.  Not surprising I suppose, considering Guilin is a tourist city, not a business city.

Comments

[Zozo Manno]

You can try http://www.chinaproxy.org for anonymous surfing. Their servers are very fast and optimized for Chinese connections.

[brough]

Thanks Zozo, but that there doesn't seem to be any response from chinaproxy.org at least over the past 4-5 hours that I've been trying.