Double Sadness Internet Hell in China

I spent a week in China on business. To my dismay, I was all but unable to access my www.netidentity.com e-mail account (Boyd@JonesEmail.com ) and many Web sites in the West were incredibly slow or blocked by the Chinese Internet censors -- or both. Gmail worked well though (for the most part) and I tried to move all e-mail traffic to Gmail during that week.

Truly Internet hell. "Double" in the sense that the sites like Wikipedia.org remain blocked by the China Internet cops -- and in the sense that the Taiwan earthquake in late December 2006 (and the cutting of underseas cables) is still slowing Internet access in China.

Things were a little better in Hong Kong (I assume Hong Kong has some Internet access redundancy of some sort) and back to normal when I returned to Taiwan (although the earthquake cut cables south of Taiwan, Taiwan's access itself to the Internet cloud was not affected).

Great Asian Internet disruption of 2006 continued

Although 90% of the sites I visit are not affected, I have noticed that sites hosted in Hong Kong or Mainland China are loading VERY slowly indeed. Sites and e-mail accounts hosted over there.

Furthermore, many friends in Hong Kong and China continue to complain that maybe they can get Skype to work, but not MSN Messenger and that foreign sites (such as blogspot blogs) load very, very slowly for them if at all.

Great Asian Internet Disruption of 2006

The earthquake last night near Taiwan seems to have caused quite a lot of Internet access issues:

My colleagues in China report huge problems accessing foreign sites and Hotmail and Yahoo mail. I, in Taipei, Taiwan, however, have had absolutely no problems today accessing any of the "usual suspect" sites such as Yahoo, Google, Gmail, Blogspot, Techcrunch, etc.

One friend in Taiwan indicated that he is accessing Web sites rather slowly though.