I have a matter of live and death on my hand now, so I appreciate any advise.
What is your experience of accessing AS servers from mainland China? I'm stuck in Suzhou for about two weeks and found, to my horror, that I can barely reach AS from here. Tried multiple places: hotel, office, different shopping malls and it always the same. Is such behavior regular for mainland China or it's just local provider for the area that sucks? Is there any simple way to improve connection?
I have just been to China for 10 days in Xian and Beijing. Flew out to LAX yesterday. I had no trouble connecting in either of the cities. But I had a lot of issues with other websites though.
Does your login require Facebook? Because if so, that might be the problem…
No, I never used FB login and I'm pretty much aware FB is suppressed here. Not that I miss it.
For me it works as very slow and unstable connection, about 30-40% of calls timeout, others are just slow, nearly like in phone modem times. Tried two new places today and it's the same, probably just weak uplink from local provider.
Seems like I had to endure it and hope my airlines will cherish without much of my care.
No, I never used FB login and I'm pretty much aware FB is suppressed here. Not that I miss it.
For me it works as very slow and unstable connection, about 30-40% of calls timeout, others are just slow, nearly like in phone modem times. Tried two new places today and it's the same, probably just weak uplink from local provider.
Seems like I had to endure it and hope my airlines will cherish without much of my care.
Two times when I were there… Once I had the same issue with you, and another time it was seamless. I think all of this is probably due to the Firewall, so a VPN might be useful!
Don't forget that most international connections from China are using submarine cables (either via Pacific Ocean and the US, or via Singapore and around India). This is adding around 200 to 250 ms in the roundtrip time of IP packets under normal conditions and this is something you notice already. Network links might be used at or close to their capacity, so especially at peak times in Europe, US or China, you might additionally get some packet loss which is also noticeable. GFW for Airlinesim itself should be rather easy, but of course, the google analytics stuff is blocked here in China (because it's Google) and that slows down the page loading. The Facebook login button on the portal is also causing delays, and so on.
I'm living in China now for a few years already and I've seen a lot of things with the network connection (also good ones, for a few weeks, my main access to my employer in Germany was via a much shorter link, presumably a land cable via Asia, RTT was around 100 ms instead of the usual 270, hell, that rocked).
Off topic, but submarine cable, land cable, all is fiber optic, we are talking about imperceptible delays ... how do you think communications form USA travels to Europe... yeah, submarine cable that is. Submarine cable and fiber optic, usually running ATM, SDH, SONET... RT delay times about 50 ms between Europe and USA or less.
The ONLY way when delays occur and RT delay becomes important is for VOIP telephony / videoconferencing, using SATELLITE links. Satellite for basic web browsing is still OK.
So, landline, or submarine, fiber optic makes no difference whether you connect to AS servers in Europe via Tokyo and Los Angeles or via Hyderabad and Zurich. All is fine unless you beam your signals ip over into the alien space.
The problem may be only, and only, in the Chinese firewall.
Off topic, but submarine cable, land cable, all is fiber optic, we are talking about imperceptible delays ... how do you think communications form USA travels to Europe... yeah, submarine cable that is. Submarine cable and fiber optic, usually running ATM, SDH, SONET... RT delay times about 50 ms between Europe and USA or less.
The ONLY way when delays occur and RT delay becomes important is for VOIP telephony / videoconferencing, using SATELLITE links. Satellite for basic web browsing is still OK.
So, landline, or submarine, fiber optic makes no difference whether you connect to AS servers in Europe via Tokyo and Los Angeles or via Hyderabad and Zurich. All is fine unless you beam your signals ip over into the alien space.
The problem may be only, and only, in the Chinese firewall.
It does indeed make a difference if you're using land cable or submarine cable: submarine cables from Eastern Asia to any place in Europe run via HKG, SIN and around India through the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean (connections from Europe to US on the other hand are quite direct, althought they're submarine, as there's no land mass in the Atlantic Ocean and the cables can run straight).
It's around 30.000 km (one way) and way longer than the more or less direct path that can be used for a land cable through Kazakhstan, Russia and eastern Europe - which maybe accumulates to 8000 to 10000 km (one way). The 30.000 km submarine cable path accounts for already 200 ms delay, while the land cable only has 50 to 60 ms. These delays are important for e.g. communication case where you're dealing with a lot of small requests and small responses, e.g. the information that's needed for rendering a web page, that need to be retrieved one after another. Approximatlty 250 ms (1/4 of a second) is something that you visibly notice these delays and then that's just the network transmission time. Information has to be created on the server side and also rendered on the client. And it get worse when you're dealing with packet loss. And even when you're streaming bigger chunks of data, you have to consider your TCP window size to account for how much data is 'on the fly' at the same time. Those 250 ms are comparably long, in terms of time units a computer usually deals with.
Thanks fr VPN suggestion, but that§s a bit over the top. I'm not staying here for long enough to justify it for myself and don't want to trouble guys I'm here for with such nuisance.
This longer delay issue I would take if we were discussing some on-line shooter or like that. Normal browser has timeout in seconds and I definitely tried to configure Firefox with 10 seconds timeout, to no improvement. I tend to agree with rubiohiguey, with reasoning that AS pages I request are rare for Chinese internet, so, probably, they aren't in firewall cache and need to be re-checked every time. On overloaded system that my cause quite long processing times. Also during night my access seems to be much better, now if only I can sleep till mid-day after that!
I met the similar problem, when I short stay in Zhejiang, close to Suzhou. About 20% page access will timeout and I have to reload. And the payment system by credit card sucks, it never load the JAVA script to let me enter credit card detail (this is reported to as and solved by using a Japan VPN).
I have been using a reliable VPN service for many years ago with so many serves and good speed and stability, they are using SSH tunneling for bypassing GFW. They offer a big discount nowadays https://www.bridgevpn.com/en/smoketunnel/