China Net Speed

[Pengyou]

This device is often advertised on Facebook.  Does anyone know how, if at all, it works?

 

 

 

[abcdefg]

Info here: https://chinanetspeed.com/

[mungouk]

I agree with this mention on Reddit that it looks "scammy"... claims of 400% boost in speed, stock photos all over the website, etc.  

 

I don't really see what installing a bit of software on a Raspberry Pi is going to do for you.

 

I also don't agree with the premise that using a VPN slows you down... Fair enough I was in a Tier 1 city with 100Mbps in my apartment, but when I was in Beijing I found that I had much better connectivity when using a VPN than when not using one.

 

 

[Chinanetspeed]

Thanks for your questions! Happy to explain more:

 

In the briefest sense, Fast internet in China requires three aspects: Fast CPU, Bandwidth quality, and intelligent network optimization. 

- Powerful CPU is needed to run the encryption protocols as most consumer routers will max out ~30Mbps. We use commonly available hardware (raspberry pi) as a "wifi add-on" that because of it's bigger CPU, can run as fast as ~200Mbps

- Premium Bandwidth - The same pi device acts as a gateway to access our bandwidth. Not all internet is the same in China! Quick search on 国际精品网 or "VIP internet" can tell you more

- Intelligent Network - LIke the weather, internet routing in China changes constantly - What worked before may not work today! Indeed, that's actually where we see a lot of the frustration for users in China using traditional circumvention methods, and built our service with intelligent "self-healing" ability to recognize network problems and adapt as needed.

 

Finally, in regards to your comment, it's well-known that traditional VPNs do typically come with fairly large amount of data overhead, which results in speed loss. Each home has different routing characteristics though, which may explain why your location was much better than elsewhere. Again, it's important to acknowledge that what worked for you may not work for others, and as mentioned, what worked before may not work today!

 

If any further questions, feel free to contact us directly. We are here to help!

[mungouk]

@Chinanetspeed how about pointing us to some independent reviews...?

 

[alantin]

7 hours ago, Chinanetspeed said:

- Intelligent Network - LIke the weather, internet routing in China changes constantly - What worked before may not work today! Indeed, that's actually where we see a lot of the frustration for users in China using traditional circumvention methods, and built our service with intelligent "self-healing" ability to recognize network problems and adapt as needed.

 

I don't see how you could create any significant improvement with a rasperry PI...

 

Internet routing changes all the time all over the world. Operator networks use specialized protocols to manage this and while it can affect speeds, I can't see this happening in China so much more that this would adversely affect consumers unless there are major outages like earthquakes or tsunamis destroying critical infrastructure.

 

7 hours ago, Chinanetspeed said:

- Premium Bandwidth - The same pi device acts as a gateway to access our bandwidth. Not all internet is the same in China! Quick search on 国际精品网 or "VIP internet" can tell you more

 

Without knowing "VIP internet" in China and only talking on a general level, anything running on Layer three or above in OSI model will be subject to any QoS or other techniques that may be in use in the operator networks to prioritize or limit different types of traffic. A PI router encapsulating the traffic and sending it over the existing network connection may be able to circumvent some of such prioritization rules, but to get prioritization you need to get it from your operator. No piece of software in a PI can affect such QoS rules and any gains would be based on no rule existing in the network for the encapsulation protocol (L2TP, PPTP, OpenVPN, WireGuard, etc). Any gained advantage would be lost immediately when an operator starts limiting or blocking such protocols. These protocols are also well known, so all operators should already have in place any QoS rules or filtering they want.

 

If you want to do network optimization, you'll need SD-WAN configurations and multiple network connections, preferably from different operators. Also the best way to get reliable point to point connections between different locations, that I know of, would still be MPLS connections.

 

 

7 hours ago, Chinanetspeed said:

- Powerful CPU is needed to run the encryption protocols as most consumer routers will max out ~30Mbps. We use commonly available hardware (raspberry pi) as a "wifi add-on" that because of it's bigger CPU, can run as fast as ~200Mbps

 

This argument has some merit. This is however dependent on the hardware you have in any VPN product you are using. Also if your consumer router is already maxing out at 30Mbps, then just encapsulating the traffic being sent through it will not change this. If anything, this would actually slow you down due to additional overhead in the encapsulation protocol. Compressing the data before encryption would help, but this would also add CPU overhead in both sending and receiving end.

 

 

I believe often slow down is experienced for example when a site is using a CDN that is completely or partly blocked in China and the page will end up waiting for elements to be loaded or network connections to time out. Routing traffic through a VPN, which makes these CDN's available, would result in such "slow" sites to open in a flash even though the actual bandwidth between the client and the server/CDN could even be significantly worse.