Great firewall, 2014

April 22, 2014 5:34 PM

Hi, Looks like I will be spending a good while in China and I'd love to read your recent experiences with VPNs, general internet use there. (I noted a question about this from almost two years ago, with lots of people speaking well of witopia, can believe things have changed.) I'll be in Chongqing, for what that's worth. Thank you for taking a moment to help me.
posted by ambient2 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Sorry, this isn't direct experience, but was recently reading this blogger's experience in China and came across this in describing usage of VPN while traveling. Might be helpful.
posted by ihavequestions at 5:48 PM on April 22, 2014

I just finished a 3 week trip in China (didn't visit Chongqing specifically though.) I mostly stayed in backpacker hostels and internet was typically slow. Same for restaurants, public wifi hotspots, and so on. If you're staying in nicer or more business-oriented places, this might not be as much of a problem. I used VyperVPN and had no complaints. It seemed some businesses are able to block the use of VPNs on their network, so sometimes the VPN didn't work, but when that was the case, no one could use a VPN, regardless of which VPN service they chose.
posted by horizons at 6:02 PM on April 22, 2014

I used StrongVPN and it worked great.
posted by gnossos at 6:05 PM on April 22, 2014

You might want to bring along a copy of Tails on a USB stick.
posted by Poldo at 6:20 PM on April 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

I had great luck with Pandapow for a while, but for the last few months my connections have been awful. I'm down to using a free vpn on my phone and I don't really trust it privacy wise considering it's free. Others around me have Astrill and although it has its problems, it seems to be working while mine isn't. Granted, any time I have contacted Pandapow customer support I've had a great response, just haven't had the time/motivation to troubleshoot lately.
posted by sarae at 9:51 PM on April 22, 2014

BTW:
I went to answer your Metafilter mail about the same topic, but it looks like your Metafilter mail has been disabled.

Witopia seems to have fallen out of favor with most of the people that I know. Like most of these services once they get enough traction, they attract more attention. And that's definitely not the place to go if you want to do any torrenting at all.

Most people I know seem to be using Astrill these days. However, now people comment that they have to search for a different server more often than not so I think it's the case like most of these services. Send me another Metafilter email, and I will send you a link that will get my buddy a free month, since the information comes from him.

If you have your own server back in the US that's pretty much guaranteed never to get blocked if you tunnel into it with foxy proxy.
posted by chinabound at 1:30 AM on May 4, 2014

Astrill isn't perfect but it's good enough for me. I use it on my iPhone and work and home computers. I only really use the VPN for Facebook and Twitter though, Youtube more often then not is really slow.

Also, I'm Chongqing bound in a couple of months. Beware the hot pot! :)
posted by Ramo at 6:47 PM on May 18, 2014