Slow Internet

The Internet in China is soooo slow - well, just how slow is it? It depends on whether you are trying to access a website inside China or outside of China. I tested my Internet speeds today using Speedtest.net and found that if I am looking at a website in China I have download speeds of .45 Mb/s and upload speeds of .44 Mb/s. If I look at a website in Taiwan (outside China's control) I have download speeds of .39 Mb/s and upload speeds of .37 Mb/s - significantly slower. Worse yet, if I use a VPN service to tunnel through the Great Fire Wall to access a website in Britain I have incredibly slow download speeds of .20 Mb/s and upload speeds of .26 Mb/s. Obviously the filters China puts on the three gateways that the Internet uses to get into China are slowing down service tremendously. So even if you use a VPN to access banned websites outside of China they are able to slow down the transmission to a point that it becomes very inconvenient and hardly worthwhile. Today, it's actually slower than average speeds in Africa.

To put this in perspective the average speeds in North America are 5.53 ands speeds in South Korea average a blazing 17.83 So while China is trying to become a technological giant it has one of the slowest Internets in the world - due in large part to their attempts to control information their citizens can see.