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Comment by divbit | Hacker News Reader

I just spent a month living there, and while I enjoy the country(food in particular is amazing), internet speed is terrible, and basic developer needs like being able to download a docker image, is like an overnight download ( because the internet will throttle down to low kb/s on such a download). Doing full time startup work from there would require working on something fairly lightweight I think.

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I think you used the Internet provider from a different one, which is cheapist one -- whole community share one bandwidth.

My friends in China all use at least 30Mbits connection, now there is a promotion for 100MB for the same price.

It's likely that I wasn't on an optimal connection - but I also tried coffee shops, various different hotels, and several different vpn / proxy strategies and all were like this (once or twice a proxy configuration would get me about the speed you are saying for a day, but then would be not working the next day), so whatever the optimal connection is, it wasn't easy to find.

I don't know where you lived, normall, in China, you can use Interenet from Starbucks or any chain coffee stores, they are all have good Internet speed. And if you try to access Google or Youtube, FB etc, you can try ShadowSocks instead VPN.

For the slow speed between US and China, Jap (and other asian countries), I think that's the nature issue for oversea Internet connection. You can use this website (http://ping.chinaz.com/, you may need google translator) to test how speed looks like as you connect to other country from China.

(Shijiazhuang 3 weeks and Hainan 2 weeks) I did occasionally get good speed (I tried starbucks twice and one day it was decent, the other day was quite slow). There was a particular set of docker images that I had to repeatedly download that I found very painful to deal with, and eventually just decided to work on something else- I did in fact end up using shadowsocks, but on one day I set it up with a server in singapore it was reasonable (like 200-300 Kb/s), the next day it was 7Kb/s, so I'm not sure what happened. It might just be that I had a string of bad luck with connections. I guess if you live there it seems reasonable that you could buy a private faster internet connection / maybe find a reliable starbucks coffee shop. I am completely willing to accept that I might just have run into a set of bad connections and it was luck.

I heard rumors (just rumors) that Internet providers in China limit your connection speed to servers outside China unless you upgrade your service and pay more.

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