Internet Access
I went back to China in Dec 2025 and I used this opportunity to test several ways to get access to services beyond the Great Firewall (GFW).
In general I have a hard time with VPN:
- Mullvad was the only one that works most of the time. I had to connect to the Hong Kong server. The speed wasn’t great but acceptable. The annoying thing though was that if I put my laptop into sleep then I would have a hard time to reconnect on wake up.
- Astrill never worked well for me for some reason. It always showed a huge spike of outbound traffic on connection, but then I wasn’t able to resolve any URL—seemed to be a DNS leak or routing issue.
- Whatbox comes with VPN but it just didn’t work.
- Tailscale didn’t seem to work and I couldn’t connect back to my home server.
At the end I think the most reliable Internet service is actually from Airalo. I got a monthly unlimited plan during Thanksgiving with a discount. It worked almost perfectly. The only two gotchas that I ran into were:
- It uses China Unicom which doesn’t have the best coverage, especially indoors and in less urban areas.
- I traveled to Hong Kong and Macau and I was kicking myself for not getting the Asian plan instead.
I learned some of the options from The Technium: Essentials for Independent Travel in China