It also gives local competitors a leg up by helping domestic apps perform better simply by being hosted domestically (or making foreign players host inside China).
> On Mar 2, 2020, at 11:27, Ben Cannon <b...@6by7.net> wrote: > > > It’s the Government doing mandatory content filtering at the border. Their > hardware is either deliberately or accidentally poor-performing. > > I believe providing limited and throttled external connectivity may be > deliberate; think of how that curtails for one thing; streaming video? > > -Ben. > > -Ben Cannon > CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC > b...@6by7.net > > > > >> On Mar 1, 2020, at 9:00 PM, Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu...@ucr.edu> wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> We are a group of researchers at University of California, Riverside who >> have been working on measuring the transnational network performance (and >> have previously asked questions on the mailing list). Our work has now led >> to a publication in Sigmetrics 2020 and we are eager to share some >> interesting findings. >> >> We find China's transnational networks have extremely poor performance when >> accessing foreign sites, where the throughput is often persistently >> low (e.g., for the majority of the daytime). Compared to other countries we >> measured including both developed and developing, China's transnational >> network performance is among the worst (comparable and even worse than some >> African countries). >> >> Measuring from more than 400 pairs of mainland China and foreign nodes over >> more than 53 days, our result shows when data transferring from foreign >> nodes to China, 79% of measured connections has throughput lower than the >> 1Mbps, sometimes it is even much lower. The slow speed occurs only during >> certain times and forms a diurnal pattern that resembles congestion >> (irrespective of network protocol and content), please see the following >> figure. The diurnal pattern is fairly stable, 80% to 95% of the >> transnational connections have a less than 3 hours standard deviation of the >> slowdown hours each day over the entire duration. However, the speed rises >> up from 1Mbps to 4Mbps in about half an hour. >> >> >> >> We are able to confirm that high packet loss rates and delays are incurred >> in the foreign-to-China direction only. Moreover, the end-to-end loss rate >> could rise up to 40% during the slow period, with ~15% on average. >> >> There are a few things noteworthy regarding the phenomenon. First of all, >> all traffic types are treated equally, HTTP(S), VPN, etc., which means it is >> discriminating or differentiating any specific kinds of traffic. Second, we >> found for 71% of connections, the bottleneck is located inside China (the >> second hop after entering China or further), which means that it is mostly >> unrelated to the transnational link itself (e.g., submarine cable). Yet we >> never observed any such domestic traffic slowdowns within China. >> Assuming this is due to congestion, it is unclear why the infrastructures >> within China that handles transnational traffic is not even capable to >> handle the capacity of transnational links, e.g., submarine cable, which >> maybe the most expensive investment themselves. >> >> Here is the link to our paper: >> https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/sigmetrics20_slowdown.pdf >> >> We appreciate any comments or feedback. >> -- >> >> Best, >> Pengxiong Zhu >> Department of Computer Science and Engineering >> University of California, Riverside >
