China Internet Access

[chilifrei64]

Quick question here for our Chinese users here. I have a remote office in Pu Dong Shanghai and I am trying to figure out what type of equipment/service they have. We are having consistently spotty connection problems between 9pm (EST) and 11am(EST) between our US office and China office.

It is already a site to site VPN using Cisco Pix Firewalls. Everything was good up until about 3 weeks ago.

They say they are on a business class Internet Service (ADSL through China Telecom, 2mb down and 384kbps up) however I have a feeling it is a residential service they have. They used to be a small office with only about 7 to 10 users, they now have about 30 and most residential service wont support 30 users. Here is a picture of the modem

Obviously it says HomeAccess and that just leads to my suspicion. But IT company we have out there insists it is business class. Is this type of device commonly implemented in businesses in China or is this really a residential modem like I suspect?

Thanks in advance

[tain]

I'm not in China, but I think you already know that they could use a hardware and service upgrade even if they are already using a Business service. 30 users can saturate that setup pretty easily and that is probably why you are asking the question in the first place. But I'm sure that you already know all of this and are probably just looking for ammunition to bolster your argument

Perhaps you could just say "OK, we believe you. But the service right now is not meeting our needs so we are considering alternative options, to include a different IT contractor/consultant." That should get them to come around!

[chilifrei64]

We are trying alternative solutions. We have partnered up with a company local to me which just so happens to do business in China. They are looking for another company to alleviate some of the cost of a straight point to point connection they are adding from their office to Shanghai. (crazy we are right down the road from them) They have apparently been having issues of recent also. This should alleviate some of our problems, atleast with connection reliability.

I have been over and back on every connection, interface, device, cable from our server room to their office. We have replaced hardware and still nothing. I have even monitored their connection, (we have about 10,000 dollars worth of cisco equipment behind that modem) bandwidth and device utilization. No errors anywhere.

I have contacted ATT and have been over and back with them and they have everything validated from our equipment to the router before it goes across the ocean.

The only thing i have not been able to validate is China Telecom to the modem. However, my biggest problem is I cant just go to the executives of the company and say, It has to be that, it cant be anything else. I have to find out what is wrong. I cant just assume unfortunately.

So anyone from China still come to these forums. I know I have helped some out in the past.. Where did you all go???

[tain]

Have you explored a contract with China TieTong instead of CT? They are still part of the state-run monopoly, but they are a smaller and newer unit.