I have learned a few tricks like how to flush my DNS cache and a few other things, but things are simply slow and bad. It may not actually be some govt crackdown and may be just bad service I am thinking. I am still able to use witopia VPN if I employ some of the work arounds they sent and also use their L2TP and IPSEC stuff, but the truth is sometimes it can be so darn slow it is basically useless for us. I have even gotten to where I just use the net less and less out of frustration. While one can argue that that is a good thing I feel it would be a good thing if I was choosing to do it and not being forced into the decision. My wife is Chinese uses a MAC and she has less issues with .cn sites than I do with foreign sites. Even Yahoo mail is so slow I just give up and try later. And like someone said after about 11 PM things pick up for me and my uTorrent kicks in, making me think everybody sharing my bandwidth finally went to bed.

"Can easily connect to .cn sites, but everything else is pretty much impossible to reach."

A technical problem of management? Not really! Beating around the bush, really. It is the Cen......ship. Someone has got it, I thought.

Dunno but Chrome seems to be worse for OS sites on my 'puter.

Actually finding IE is faster. Not tried firefox.

Everything laotou (nice tips!) and others have said is right (I also have around 10 years IT Support / Network Admin exp). As others have noticed, some times of day are better than others. Torrents work fine during the day (although some days are still crappy, like today for me), but I switch that off between about 8pm to midnight (or leave it running overnight).

VPN service has been a LOT less reliable in the past 3 months or so. I got a 12 month sub with 12vpn which worked quickly and flawlessly for about 6 months, but then it started not connecting at all around March. Or at least it would take upto 20 attempts to get a line through. If you search around, you'll see reports of them getting blocked a lot. It's been better recently, but still fails on my fave servers sometimes occasionally forcing me to try another part of the world.

But obviously the speed of the connection through the VPN just compounds the ADSL line sharing problems. Never will I again complain about how slow 4Mb/s is back home.

What I'm surprised at is that the GFW hasn't started re-blocking news sites such as the BBC what with all the stuff going on in Syria, Egypt etc and the crackdowns on protests ("strolls") that happened in BJ not so long ago.... Yet they STILL block Flickr :/

Jiesi - the philosophy on censorship has changed in recent years. BBC, CNN etc are no longer seen as threats (although the chinese language sections of the sites are still blocked). It is user generated content and social media which is seen as the real threat to stability.
They don't care if the BBC carries a story about Syria or even about the Dalai Lama. They do, however, care if people are discussing this on twitter or weibo or posting pictures/video about sensitive subjects to flickr/youtube/youku etc.

So pleased to read this thread today, ie it's not just me! Started about 2 weeks ago for me - getting disconnected every minute or two, sometimes even more often. Occassionally I'm on for 20 minutes before disconnect. Mostly when trynig to connect to .COM sites. I thought my ISP were mucking me about, but it seems it's a bigger problem! Really hope things settle down again soon. Thanks for all the background info and the "you are not alone" vibe!

Looks like there's a new man, uhm, office in town...

www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384921,00.asp

www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/20/content_12545488.htm

Perhaps something is cracking down, as ChinaDaily posts some things about New York... maybe an increase in supervision of what we are doing. Terrible for international exposure and hosted sites, businesses with international outlets may get affected without the access... (I too am having problems accessing anything outside of a chinese host)

Interesting that social networks are seen as a bigger threat to society's morals than prawnography.

Indeed, perhaps a little fishy.