Site Connectivity in China: Special Features and Solutions

On the surface, Site Connectivity for companies is a simple matter, which has been realized for years mostly by means of VPN connections. Unfortunately, this is only half the story when it comes to connecting a site in China. In a country where compliance with rules is very important, there is also a lot to consider when setting up company networks. Fortunately, there are ways to solve this problem too.

The peering problem

In much of the West, peering is something that many customers barely think about. Telecommunications companies, data centers and T1 ISPs peer without argument, thanks to long-established contract models with names like settlement-free and sender-keeps-all. In the PRC, the picture is quite different. There are no network operators there that peer freely in the interests of the common good.

China Telecom and China Unicom – the country’s terrestrial carriers – are not the best of friends when it comes to peering. Even between major cities, resources for transferring data traffic at switching hubs can be extremely limited. If possible, you should therefore stick with a provider within China.

If a company has its Internet lines with China Telecom, then data traffic runs the entire route via the CT infrastructure. However, if the routing only includes a POP from China Unicom, this can lead to a massive drop in performance.

International connectivity

As described above, peering within the country is often a hurdle. As you would expect, international peering has the same problem, but in an exacerbated form. China’s big three – China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile – have immense cultural differences: an old-school telecom company, a deliberate challenger and a company based on waves rather than wires.

For effective peering to another country, all three must therefore enter into separate agreements with foreign carriers. At present, such agreements are rare. This leads to high latency and packet loss. One solution to this is the Savecall Dedicated China Connect product, which is described in more detail below.

The great firewall

The Chinese government in Beijing wants to restrict access to websites that it does not like. All telecommunications providers – whether state or private – must adhere to a list of websites published by Beijing and block them. This means that Chinese citizens have no access to Google or Facebook. VPN connections are also increasingly being blocked or throttled. This causes considerable problems for business applications that want to access central services outside China via VPN.

Savecall Dedicated China Connect is the solution

Business SD-WAN to China as described above, the network traffic leaving China is the biggest problem for companies that want to do business in China. Savecall, in cooperation with its partner China Telecom, offers a solution that both solves the peering problem with foreign countries and legally bypasses the Great Firewall. Savecall Dedicated China Connect is an SD-WAN solution that uses existing Internet lines as an underlay. Outside of China, the global cloud backbone of China Telecom is used. The respective locations are equipped with SD-WAN hardware that connects to the nearest cloud gateway. The data transmission of Savecall Dedicated China Connect is therefore not blocked by the Great Firewall and, with a latency of approx. 200ms between Germany and China, is also very high-performance. All this is done within the legal framework.

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Frank Frommknecht

Key Account Consultant