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Author Topic: Avoiding China GFW Throttling  (Read 5269 times)

Offline zurich

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Avoiding China GFW Throttling
« on: August 02, 2012, 10:18:32 PM »


I have lived in China for over 5 years and been using Strong for about one, previously I used Witopia but I am quite settled on Strong.

I live in a Tier 2 city and my broadband line is a 4Mbps, via China Telecom.  Up until a few weeks ago I was having a period of really fast speeds and watching Youtube videos was possible without pausing to buffer, however something has changed.

The same as most people my speeds when visiting Chinese sites is pretty fast, however when visiting external sites it is crappy.

We run a business and the lack of stability is also harming us.

My speed tests to UK servers (it is where I want to come out, but SF and LA are pretty similar) come in at about 0.4Mbps (with or without VPN, it makes little difference).

I took this as China throttling international traffic as they tend to do and they seem to change their mind fairly often.

HOWEVER

Last night I noticed that my torrents (almost all international peers) were totaling a download speed of 700+ Mbps (I assume that in recent days CT upgraded my line for free after all my complaining).  I wondered if this was to do with the fact that the torrents were running on a port that was not affected and so I changed my VPN to that port (9090), but alas the web browsing speeds are still just as slow.

What I don't understand is why my international torrent traffic is able to go unthrottled if it is P2P but normal traffic is getting throttled.  Is there a way that I can disguise my traffic to make it look the same as my P2P traffic so it is left alone?