Re: China’s Slow Transnational Network

[Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011 () ucr edu>]

Yes, we agree. The poor transnational Internet performance effectively puts
any foreign business that does not have a physical presence (i.e., servers)
in China at a disadvantage.
The challenge is to find out direct evidence to prove mandatory content
filtering at the border, if the government is actually doing it.

Best,
Pengxiong Zhu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, Riverside


On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 8:38 AM Matt Corallo <nanog () as397444 net> wrote:

> It also gives local competitors a leg up by helping domestic apps perform
> better simply by being hosted domestically (or making foreign players host
> inside China).
>
> On Mar 2, 2020, at 11:27, Ben Cannon <ben () 6by7 net> wrote:
>
> 
> It’s the Government doing mandatory content filtering at the border.
> Their hardware is either deliberately or accidentally poor-performing.
>
> I believe providing limited and throttled external connectivity may be
> deliberate; think of how that curtails for one thing; streaming video?
>
> -Ben.
>
> -Ben Cannon
> CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC
> ben () 6by7 net
>
>
>
> On Mar 1, 2020, at 9:00 PM, Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011 () ucr edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> We are a group of researchers at University of California, Riverside who
> have been working on measuring the transnational network performance (and
> have previously asked questions on the mailing list). Our work has now led
> to a publication in Sigmetrics 2020 and we are eager to share some
> interesting findings.
>
> We find China's transnational networks have extremely poor performance
> when accessing foreign sites, where the throughput is often persistently
> low (e.g., for the majority of the daytime). Compared to other countries
> we measured including both developed and developing, China's transnational
> network performance is among the worst (comparable and even worse than some
> African countries).
>
> Measuring from more than 400 pairs of mainland China and foreign nodes
> over more than 53 days, our result shows when data transferring from
> foreign nodes to China, 79% of measured connections has throughput lower
> than the 1Mbps, sometimes it is even much lower. The slow speed occurs only
> during certain times and forms a diurnal pattern that resembles congestion
> (irrespective of network protocol and content), please see the following
> figure. The diurnal pattern is fairly stable, 80% to 95% of the
> transnational connections have a less than 3 hours standard deviation of
> the slowdown hours each day over the entire duration. However, the speed
> rises up from 1Mbps to 4Mbps in about half an hour.
>
>
> We are able to confirm that high packet loss rates and delays are incurred
> in the foreign-to-China direction only. Moreover, the end-to-end loss rate
> could rise up to 40% during the slow period, with ~15% on average.
>
> There are a few things noteworthy regarding the phenomenon. First of all,
> all traffic types are treated equally, HTTP(S), VPN, etc., which means it
> is discriminating or differentiating any specific kinds of traffic. Second,
> we found for 71% of connections, the bottleneck is located inside China
> (the second hop after entering China or further), which means that it is
> mostly unrelated to the transnational link itself (e.g., submarine cable).
> Yet we never observed any such domestic traffic slowdowns within China.
> Assuming this is due to congestion, it is unclear why the infrastructures
> within China that handles transnational traffic is not even capable to
> handle the capacity of transnational links, e.g., submarine cable, which
> maybe the most expensive investment themselves.
>
> Here is the link to our paper:
> https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/sigmetrics20_slowdown.pdf
>
> We appreciate any comments or feedback.
> --
>
> Best,
> Pengxiong Zhu
> Department of Computer Science and Engineering
> University of California, Riverside