With everything that is good about a study abroad experience, like the food, there is also the bad. While my complaint may seem petty I have found that the Chinese internet is the most infuriating part of my experience so far. If very few of my friends were on Facebook I could live without it. If I grew up speaking Chinese I heard Baidu is totally comparable to Google in many respects. If I had to plan around "internet maintenance days" I could grow to deal with it. But the internet speeds in China are almost insultingly bad. After quickly Googling on Bing I came across Wikipedia's handy list of global internet speeds, "list of countries by internet connection speeds". The US has an average internet speed of 12.6mb/s according to the Wikipedia article. While Hong Kong SAR's internet speeds beet the US's at 15.8mb/s, mainland China's far lag behind with a slow 3.7mb/s. While I am assuming the mainland's average internet speeds is heeled back by some of the more rural parts of the country, the internet in Shanghai does not seem very fast from my personal experience. I feel truly sorry for the people of Venezuela and Bolivia who's connection speeds according to the article are 1.5mb/s and 1.8mb/s respectively. I also feel sorry for the South Korean students at ECNU who previously had a full 20.5mb/s use. If you are like many of the international students and try to add a VPN or a proxy server to the mix you can only pray that your connection is solid and fast enough to survive. So if I don't get to posting everyday or my posts seem a bit rushed, now you know why.
6 Comments
Dad
9/20/2016 10:07:47 am
2 points. First of all, you are correct about the VPN. They generally work at a percentage of the actual internet speed, so they are always slower than internet alonge. Second, if you live in Bolivia, you have worse problems than slow internet
Reply
Sharon
9/20/2016 10:20:49 am
haha. Now u won't complain about our internet here in the house:)
Reply
Jared Paul Miller
9/20/2016 10:44:45 am
Everything is relative.
Reply
emily
9/20/2016 11:24:40 pm
ouch man, that sucks :(
Reply
Jared Paul Miller
9/21/2016 12:04:25 pm
Tell me about it
Reply
gramma M.
9/21/2016 02:49:25 am
For your grandparents, the web is unsafe at any speed. Always wondering who is going to be out there hacking away. Not that I have anything to discover except a proposed order of custody to be signed by a judge--but still like privacy.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
Categories
All
|