There's often an assumption of blocking. System wide technical problems can occur which can alternately take out or slow down links to Europe or the Americas. A lack of redundancy can also be problematic. Allegedly there is more diverse server infrastructure serving the City of London than there is connecting China to the rest of the world. Add general incompetence and ignorance on the part of individual technicians (one telecoms engineer had little understanding of how DNS tables worked) and it's a wonder the service operates as well as it does. It does operate very well as a Chinese Intranet. Oh, finally, there is always the over zealous petty official who can take actions that lead to consequences never intended by their superiors. Arguably the GFW gets more credit (or opprobrium) than it deserves.
I guess you're right. But that still doesn't really explain why mail.google.com was partially available while almost any other .com address wasn't (even the ones with servers in HK). Also why I now can use plus.google.com again with simply OpenWeb, whereas before I had to use StealthVPN to do so.
It's really hard to say what is intentional and what isn't, although it's probably safe to argue that blocking out all foreign internet is an accident. Wonder if it was Yunnan only.
The DNS servers for China Telecom have always been horrible, but I've noticed they've gotten considerably worse lately(probably on purpose).
For example if you load a website like example.com it might take ten tries. But if you add www and load www.example.com it will only take two or three tries.
I have two servers that hardly ever load in China. One is hosted on DigitalOcean and the other on OpenShift. Once I change the computer to use a different DNS server they then load 90% of the time instead of 10% of the time.
I arrived in Kunming a couple of days ago. I was using ExpressVPN that appeared to be working well but Starting Sunday until today it basically stopped working. I could not connect to any over the connections and if I did finally get through, the internet didn't work until I disconnected ExpressVPN. I can't even access their website to chat with them.
I could use ExpressVPN last night. Took 4 or 5 tries though. Generally if you have problems connecting for a long time try disconnecting the modem/router for the internet and reconnecting.
This morning without VPN I couldn't even connect to China Eastern Airlines web page... yeah, go figure. Later in the morning, without VPN, I finally connected after more than a dozen tries.
ExpressVPN seems on a dodgy day for me to today. Never usually but today if it connects the connection barely lasts five minutes before freezing up again!
Not a happy chappy :(
Have you tried Psishon? It's free.
Think I may as well look into it as a backup for the one I'm using if free :)
Take it you meant Psiphon :)
