back to article Breaching China's Great Firewall is hard. Pushing packets faster than 1Mbps once through is the Boss Fight

79 percent of internet traffic flows into China struggle to flow faster than 1Mbps, but the Great Firewall is probably not to blame. So says PhD student Pengxiong Zhu, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, whose research has been showcased by regional internet registry …

  1. cb7

    Chinese no flied packet

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    incoming packets are delayed because they have to be individually approved by the party

    outgoing packets are pre-approved government responses delivered straight from the people's server farm collective, so the only delay is selecting the correct packet

  3. lglethal Silver badge
    Facepalm

    This would of course have nothing to do with encouraging usage of local services, by simply making foreign services slow and unreliable.

    Of course not, silly of me to suggest it...

  4. EricM

    So even in China simple commercial greed does more harm ...

    than their so-called "communism" and contol-madness combined.

    Interesting ...

    1. John Jennings

      Re: So even in China simple commercial greed does more harm ...

      Thant isnt communism - china isnt communist and the Communist party is communist

      It is a dictatorship with a globalisation capitalism model and state protectionism against external competitors. Long play is the name of the game

      China is as communist now as North Korea is democratic...

      There are some socialist and communist traces within the ruling party - though not enough to interfere with Xi Jinpings 14 point 'thaught policy'

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So even in China simple commercial greed does more harm ...

        Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.

        China is an anarcho-syndicalist commune and decisions are ratified at bi-weekly meetings by an executive officer by a simple majority.

        Educate yourself!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.

          The eternal moan of the bourgeoisie....

          Why can't you peasants just get back to work?

      2. EricM

        Re: So even in China simple commercial greed does more harm ...

        sure, that's why I used "so-called" before and "\"" around the word communism....

  5. Androgynous Cow Herd

    simple

    extra caching once it's through the firewall, bandwidth throttled to control injest rate...

    Might the Chinese simply be storing incoming traffic for later analysis, but they haven't been able to get the full plans for 3ch0lon yet?

  6. DS999 Silver badge

    China has little incentive to increase external bandwidth

    At least not for the masses. That slowness provides extra protection against those who find ways around the Great Firewall's censorship.

    It is like if you had two websites you could visit for the same information. One is very fast but censors and collects personal information, the other is totally open and private but frustratingly slow. Which do you think most people would choose?

    1. Youngone Silver badge

      Re: China has little incentive to increase external bandwidth

      As the article explains, it is not a matter of bandwidth.

  7. William Higinbotham

    Through Earth - The Other Side

    I remember a long time ago -"Flush twice, it is a long way to China"

  8. CommanderGalaxian

    Once-upon-a-time import/export financial tariffs were imposed to ensure free trade.

    Now it will be data flow tariffs.

    China has taken the piss for too long. This is easy to fix though.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Must be an Americanism. Here in the UK, we see Oz as the other side of the world and we have no reason to want to dump shit on them. On the other hand, they might welcome the flush. They'd just filter, clean and use it to combat the droughts, probably using the left over solids as fertilizer :-)

  9. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    so...

    so, essentially, to keep the great firewall from overloading, and due to high cost of int'l transit (due to this firewall) isps there are throttling incoming international traffic.

  10. Toolman83

    Paying extra to have a better class of service.... sounds like... Capitalism...

  11. sabroni Silver badge
    Meh

    re: over more than 53 days

    So 54 days then? If day counting is too tricky for them why should we trust their bit rates?

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: re: over more than 53 days

      It could be 55. But it's no longer called Peking by us foreigners.

  12. chuBb.

    Tiered service == tiered firewall

    And who insisted that the Isps tier, wouldn't that provide an easy way to add a secondary packet inspection/tagging mechanism would it? As data ingress isn't a problem when it's state initiated, private and international customers though we'll pay for speed and extra inspection, or go slow and traverse the GFWoC fewer times.

    That and as mentioned drive traffic to domestic services due to working better/faster, and the practicalities that most sites designed to use a roman alphabet are unusable when used with a character based text, just look at most .jp or .cn sites it's like the last 25years of web design has never happened... Never mind reading right to left or in vertical columns depending on dialect and context, basically html isn't up for the job which is one reason apps dominate in those markets...

  13. razorfishsl

    It is simple......

    The carriers get paid a FIXED amount for adsl and other such bullshit, but for mobile they get to charge for the data...

    That's why you see 40Gb fiber to their mast head controllers, but are lucky if you can get a 100mb line fitted into the factory below the mast equipment...

    Then you have the situation where mobile data is packet switched between ultra modern infrastructure, where as house hold & factory kit is usually plugged into half assed rack equipment at the ISP...

    Also he is incorrect in this statment:

    “all packet types share the same packet loss — TCP, UDP and ICMP don’t have noticeable differences."

    this is completely incorrect.. and can be proved by changing the packet size...,

    There are "fixes" to ensure the network looks faster than it is...

  14. si 4

    404

    Link to article leads to a 404 for me.

    Interested as quite a lot of our traffic goes through China and they seem to be traffic managing Microsoft Streams now leading to issues.

    1. plunet

      Re: 404

      It's available on his Uni homepage at https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/

      https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/sigmetrics20_slowdown.pdf

  15. JCitizen
    Holmes

    So maybe...

    IF you are a top tier subscriber you get the whole picture, with a minimum of censorship. Seems like this would be necessary for the industrial giants in China, as you cannot make accurate business decisions without accurate information. I often wondered how they'd go about that, and now I think this article solves my problem.

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