I've been here since September and have been using my wife's family internet access. Although it has been slow, most of the US sites I went to in September were accessible like cnn, huffington post and others but since 3 weeks ago, these sites are no longer accessible. They don't appear to be blocked like Bloomberg. They appear to be stuck in either waiting or transferring but I never get the site up so I am forced to use an internet proxy which brings them up. I have reset the modem and wifi access several times for more than 5 minutes but still no change. Any idea what is going on?

I'm not having any problems with or without a proxy.

If i am not using my VPN and go straight to HK google then it sometimes seems like i get stuck and can wait for long periods of time. I find then much quicker to use Baidu and then go into google from there and seems much quicker. Nice thing about VPN is you can access everything in USA including facebook which i care little about except my kids use it.

This may be a temporary problem until after big18

@vagabond48
The internet in China tends to slow down before any major government activity - such as the upcoming 08 Nov accession/election of Xi JinPing to the General Secretary of the CCCP (first step on the way to becoming President of China in Mar 2013).

Annually - this happens around this time as thats when China holds its annual national planning and reporting meetings - China publicly plans its economy 5 years in advance.

That said - it "could" just be China Telecom mucking around with your phone lines for a few months as they "beautify Kunming" which means tearing up streets and stuff.

Also - if you're on ADSL like the rest of the people - ADSL is shared - which means as more people in your neighborhood discover the internet via computers and now wifi enabled mobile phones - they're all on your pipe to the internet - think of it as more neighbors with toilets, showers, and laundry - the sewer pipes weren't designed to handle that much traffic. Most are doing streaming video and streaming music...or downloading Microsoft's infinite patches and updates.

FINALLY - you could try changing your DNS settings to use google's DNS servers - 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 - but sometimes it works...black magic if one doesn't know the true problem. If you can't reach a site because of a timeout - try PING to see if at least the IP address of the site is resolving (too much tech?). And if you're exceptionally masochistic today - you can do a TRACERT (trace route) for fun - to see how your internet connection ricochets around inside China Telecom before they let you out of the country...and then ricochets around the USA (courtesy of the FBI and Homeland Security amongst others) on the way to your ultimate destination.

Failing all those things - get a VPN (search other gokm threads on recommended VPNs).

I've noticed using anything related to google.com or google.com.hk will slow down the internet if you're not using a vpn. Try google.ca or their other domains instead google.com and google.com.hk

My suggestion is get a cheap vpn when you want to read the news. Ones based out California seem to be the fastest for western news.

Just for the record, the internet speed was never the issue. The sites I mentioned just hang but when I use a free proxy like vtunnel, they come up fairly quickly. I also use Google DNS servers so that was of no help. Tracert might be interesting to try. As far as google is concerned, I have given up on it and I am using yahoo search. I live in Chiang Mai and thought as of my visit last year, that the internet there was worse than China. My visit this time has proven otherwise.
Thanks for the comments.