Catshanghai

Using the Internet in China is like being constipated with someone else’s bowel.

I have to use the Internet to teach ICT and I would love my classes to make full use of interactive web tools such as Youtube, Skype, podcasting, UStream, Twitter and Delicious. The problem is that all this international data needs to be sheep dipped at the Great Firewall, which slows it down until it is almost unuseable. Large classes often cannot use these services, because students will spend the whole lesson staring at slow downloads and timeout errors.

I read today that Jeff Utecht of SAS is having similar issues, which is almost reassuring. Jeff laments:

(9 tabs in Firefox trying to load)

Six web pages trying to load
Two Youtube videos I want to watch
Want to listen/purchase songs from Amazon
Want to leave comments on other blogs
Instead I’m sitting here wasting my time because pages won’t load. I try and not complain about China or the Internet speed here too much but when it won’t allow me to do the things I want to do and I waste a night of productivity because of it…I get frustrated.
Relying on the Network

I hope for both of our sakes that we find a way to improve our Internet experience in China, although Jeff is off to Bangkok where the web is much freer.

The school is trying to support me. They have said they will upgrade our pipe from 4 to 8 mbps and they have set up 20 gb of space on a server to cache recently visited sites. I would like to go further and setup web services such as Moodle, blogs and media cacheing using local servers that are accessible by our students outside school. I would like these services to use technologies such as Google Gears that give offline access in the event that the Internet grinds to a halt. Changes could be synced back to the server later.

Such projects take a lot of investment in terms of time and money, because we would be setting up new servers, configuring web software, training people and writing resources. It is a big project that is not going to appear tomorrow even though it is inevitable that further development is required to cope with our growing demand for computers and the Internet.

My recent stress posts have had a tone of woe betide me, which is a little unfortunate given that I want to lay the ground for a series of positive Shanghai hacks. Still, I am encouraged by a couple of posts that point to a better future. Wes Fryer of Moving at the Speed of Thought talks about the idea of Bring Your Own Bandwith as a way of keeping yourself well connected even when the school’s pipe is filtered or flaky. (Source: BYOB Fryer uses a portable 3G laptop modem to make sure he can always get online without any problems. David Feng
hinted today that Shanghai may have access to high speed mobile 3G data services at the end of this month.( Source: 3G Ready in Beijing, Shanghai, and 6 Other Cities) Imagine what would happen if our students had 3G connections on their phones and laptops. The collective bandwidth of our school would increase to hundreds of megabits per second or would it result in a huge data jam as the local cells get overwhelmed with too many requests for data?