Slow Internet Connection at Home

The internet connection at my home (China Telecom FTTB+LAN) is unbearably slow. In the recent month, I found it was so hard even to load the homepage of this blog.

I doubt whether it was due to the high usage of BT on the community network. The short-come for FTTB+LAN is, the network speed is not guaranteed. When there is less traffic, it can be super fast. But when the traffic is crowded, it can be slow.

I miss ADSL again, but it is not available in my home. Sometimes, I will have to switch to China Unicom CDMA solution. It is even faster than the broadband at home. It is ridiculous.

30 thoughts on “Slow Internet Connection at Home

  1. I am amazed by your effecient using time. With such a slow internet connection and the large workload which I guess you have, you still got time to build a Chinese blog and a English blog as well. This really makes me, maybe not only me, feel aweful.

  2. Normally FTTB+LAN is faster but ADSL is more stable. FTTB+Lan is a share solution and you will get poor speed if many others using the same line with you:)

  3. The speed decrease only happens within the last two months. I don’t have evidence, but my guess is, more and more users start to use BT on LAN now.

  4. Hmm, so you think it’s saturation of the lines that’s slowing down the Internet access? In the US we have companies that give us, wireless or direct connect, FTTB LAN access that’s usually fast but they’re national and i guess they have very high capacity on their lines.

    Most public places like hotels though, use DSL of some form, it is indeed more reliable w/o as many outages. these days it’s also fast.

    Actually this raises a question, since I’ll probably be going to China sometime next year- do you all have “wireless cities” the way some places in the US are trying to do (tho w/o much success i’ll admit)? In other words, places where the whole city, or at least a bunch of city blocks, are all within a wireless access network, so you can just use a laptop or desktop to connect? That would be awesomely convenient, we could connect up anywhere there to send Email, write messages, do work or whatever as long as our computer is enabled for it.

  5. Paul, thanks for your comments, on this entry and other three entries. You are welcome to this blog.

    In Shanghai, there are many Internet Access Points. Some of them are free, like the one in Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, at ground floor of 666, Fuzhou Road. However, most of them are not free. There is no blocks in Shanghai that is fully covered by wireless, so far as I know.

    In Shanghai, a more practical way to get Internet Access is to have a China Unicom CDMA card. It works everywhere inside the city (and outside).

  6. Regarding wireless in China. It wouldn’t really make sense for the cities in China to go wireless when 90% of the population can’t afford to have a computer. The 10% are the elite few which ends up being like half a billion people already. (I’m guestimating here)

    As he Jian Shuo mentioned, you can get wireless at some of the coffee shops here in Shanghai, but then only the well off can afford a 30RMB cup of coffee. You have to remember that the average wage in Shanghai is only around 2000RMB a month. (~8RMB=1USD). My guess is that the more affluent office worker makes around double that on average (4000RMB).

    I know many of us living in China have some sort of broadband but I also know that many people still dialup to get access. The time that people have broadband is when they are working in their office. At my office, wifi and mobile phones (for guests) are banned due to security reasons.

    Maybe Jian Shuo can enlighten us a little as he’s more experienced in China.

  7. This was on the Shanghai Daily Newspaper today. (www.shanghaidaily.com) I’m very surprised that the newspaper says there are only 35,000 users of WIFI in China right now…

    Firms form WAPI body to perk shelved project

    Zhu Shenshen

    2006-03-09

    A TOTAL of 22 Chinese companies established a WAPI alliance on Tuesday, a move to revive a project, shelved two years ago, to make the homegrown wireless local area network, or WLAN, standard compulsory nationwide.

    The alliance’s setup is a blow to the US-developed WiFi, which currently dominates the Chinese WLAN market and it may influence several millions of laptop computer users in China, industry insiders said.

    The alliance’s members include four major telecom operators, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Netcom, computer makers Lenovo and Founder, chip designers China IWNCOMM Co and Beijing LHWT Microelectronics Inc.

    “It is a clear signal China will revive the project as telecom giants have joined the industry,” said Li Ke, an analyst at Beijing-based CCID Consulting Co, a research firm under the Ministry of Information Industry.

    Compared with WiFi, WAPI – WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure – provides a higher security level with an encryption chip.

    Concerned over national security, China originally planned to ban WiFi products from June 1, 2004. But it then agreed to delay the ban during a trade summit in the United States in April 2004.

    WLAN service is becoming more popular in China as many people log onto the Internet in public sites including airports, hotels and restaurants. Intel, a major promoter of WiFi in China, dominates the domestic market.

    There are currently 35,000 personal WiFi users in China and the number will hit 80,000 in 2008, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based information technology consulting firm.

    Internet and information security remains a concern in China and it must improve, said Zhang Xiaoqiang, a senior official at the National Development Research Commission.

    Intel said it will support an international WLAN standard and WiFi is the most popular in the world.

    If China plans to adopt WAPI, a solution also needs to be found on how to deal with people who have purchased WiFi products. Customers have to pay to upgrade from WiFi to WAPI and many are not willing to fork out money, said Li.

  8. shockr, I tried not to get involved in the discussion about WAPI and WLAN. I thought WAPI is the wrong way to go before that it breaks the international standards, and brings too much cost on the device change/adoptors/learning/skill transfer…

    However, recently, we met friends with insight about the decision, and I learnt a lot that there are strong reasons to do it. To be short, it is to protect the local economy and manufactures, and delay the entrance of multinational companies into the market.

    It is all about the battle on benifit and interest.

  9. My internet is working too slow although i am having very good lan speed.once i started downloading a song it suddenly stopped after 80% and now it’s difficult to download songs.Please help me out.

  10. Check out this product, OnSpeed. its an internet accelerator which is compatible for both Mac and PC. It sits quietly on your pc/laptop in the background, and flexible enough for you to turn it on or off. Trials have showed that it increases dial-up speed to up to 10 times, some times, even more. Go and have a look – http://www.onspeedasia.com

  11. hello,

    I have lot of problems with my internet. my internet is too much slow and yahoo.com site have some problem. runtime error also appears when clicking on the link. please give me solution for this?

  12. I’m living in China.

    Formerly using Cable network, it was quite slow. I changed to ADSL 2Mb from CNC and it was ok for download but slow for surfing the net.

    Now I’m using China Telecom’s ADSL 1Mb (why would you need to buy a 2Mb when the result is the same with 1Mb) and it’s still slow, even slower when surfing the net.

    There’s no solution. It takes up to 30s/1min to load a page outside china. I learnt to be patient

  13. In the B&k Organization i found the network speed problem, network running the continuing but reply time is brek and show the diffrent time, some time show the 1ms ,2ms and present more time. I thik company have large network and still some problems.

    thinking you

    prmaod kumar

  14. I believe you can solve the problem by changing few setting in your web browser. You can go to

    http://internet-slow.blogspot.com/

    for more detail. I believe it can help. I also facing the same problem before and able to solve it by follow the instruction. Just give a try. Maybe it works for you too.

  15. I work with an ISP, my greatest headache is remote assistance in solving intermittent issues. Pls kindly help me out. Outline the main causes of such problems

  16. Hello my name is PJ and i live in Shanghai for now 3 years,

    i love this city but the only thing i hate about it is internet: the download speeds are really slow compare to europe and all the other countries….may i ask why ? or how to make the internet faster ? Because downloading a game at 200 kb/s max is really annoying… Even my friend thats a computer nerd cant do more then 220 kb/s so can anybody help ?

  17. does china’s ISP throttle bandwidth to bittorrent/utorrent ports ? . And is there an encrypted version of internet explorer something like opera mini that can surf facebook in china?

  18. wang,

    The internet access at my hotel is very slow. The hotel people say they cant increase my internet speed. So I am planning to take a wireless connection. Btw i am staying in shanghai till August. So i need something for short, but good speed and unlimited download. Could ne1 suggest where can i get this connection,money is not an issue.

    Thanks,

    Suman

  19. I’m living in China for 4 years now, and experience the same problem.

    Usually, browsing chinese sites is fast but once your packet leave China, there seems to be a bottleneck. You know how difficult it is to get a visa in China ;)

    Latency get ridiculousy high ( > 500 ms ) and the average packet loss could be up to 30% !

    Whether it is DSL or FTTB+Lan, the experience is horrible and you have no SLA to guarantee you bandwidth, even in business buildings !

    I wish good luck to companies working with applications hosted in Europe through VPN….

    Fortunately i work in IT and thanks god I found some solutions : for home users you need to use VPN solutions ( easy to find but not cheap), and for business I found a great company that finally provides a stable connection : 250ms latency and really poor packet loss..

    You can contact me if you need help i can give you advices…

  20. I live in Shanghai. Shanghai has the slowest average internet speeds in all of China. Now i m thinking to change my internet connection to wireless.. Can anybody suggest me about wireless internet connection in Shanghai?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *