A colleague sent me this article asking my thoughts: http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/your-internet-connection-feel-slow-its-probably-not-your-router-684008/
A lot of people automatically assume the best internet experience will be found in Beijing or Shanghai but we’ve never known that to be the case. A lot of people will automatically assume it is the GFW/Great Firewall but in fact from my experience it simply seems to be packetloss due to congestion. China has an enormous amount of demand for bandwidth since it has the highest amount of users (736million as of 2017!) in the world. This is why for compevo and Techrich we’ve always avoided the major centers due to the congestion. However, bandwidth and good connectivity inside and outside of China is not always dictated by the location and even the backbone in the same cities of China are not created equally. It takes a lot of research to get access to reliable and fast bandwidth in China but this is a completely different book to write.
With that in mind there are many ways around the slow internet in China, if your local connection is fast and connection inside China is fast you could simply use an internet acceleration service that runs through a less congested part of China and even Hong Kong. It’s a great way to optimize your internet.
My recommendation even in 2017 is that there are many places in China with fast and reliable internet but major hubs will not likely one of them anytime soon due to the user bases in major areas being so large.