Beihang’s Lame Internet Service
Students are censored from non-mainland China websites from their classrooms and dormitories. Torrents are blocked (Yay! for encrypted headers). The residential Internet service is spotty at the best of times and nonexistent at the worst of times. It is almost always slow.
For the past ten days or so my Internet connection has just stopped working about every five to thirty minutes for one to fifteen minutes at a time. I think the problem is most likely with Beihang/CERNET’s user database, because I’m constantly having to re-login to the system. Unfortunately, the IT staff are all on vacation until tomorrow, so there’s nothing that can be done about it but live with it.
On the bright side, their service was so poor late last year that they decided (actually I think their CERNET overlords forced them) to offer a month of free service to compensate for all the downtime.
Also on the bright side, the on-the-ground tech support guy who helps troubleshoot on the phone and at your home is both knowledgeable and friendly.
Still, the Internet is not a luxury or curiosity anymore, it’s an information center, communication tool and productivity workhorse. Having it stop working a few times every hour for ten days on end is a huge frustration.
May 9, 2007 at 10:29 am
PKU doesn’t block the students (or faculty) from foreign IPs but they do have to pay extra for the service. I think it is about 100 yuan extra a month, so for most students, it is out of the question and they just use a public proxy.
My biggest gripe with PKU is that the dept. I teach in has blocked all internet access in all classrooms. If you need it, you have to ask the techie to have it activated and then log in using your own account (presumably you paid for the extra foreign IP access if you need it…). Of course if the techie is not there, or is not in the mood to turn on access, you are basically hosed.
May 9, 2007 at 10:45 am
It’s interesting to hear that PKU offers foreign access for 100 more a month. I wonder why they make that distinction. Does it cost them anything more themselves to offer that service, is it just a way to make more money, is it a politically motivated move to discourage students from accessing information the university/government deems undesirable or some combination of these? I wonder if Beihang has a similar pay for international access feature. When I asked one of the IT guys in charge of the classroom computers specifically about foreign access he said that it was restricted in the classrooms. Perhaps if I went higher up I could have it enabled? Actually, when I do need to use a foreign internet connection in the classroom I either use a Chinese proxy, a Chinese Tor entry node or VPN into my home desktop via Hamachi on my iBook and route traffic through it.
May 10, 2007 at 9:40 am
I suspect it is just a money issue, and besides the students, there are many faculty members that are also not willing to pay. PKU certainly doesn’t hide the fact that you can go “abroad” if you are willing to pony up the yuan. Take a look at the gateway https://162.105.67.4/ (or access from http://www.pku.edu.cn/ if you prefer); I’d direct you to their pricing plan but you have to be within PKU to access it. It is top secret information after all
What I find disheartening is that while this an irritant for me, for students it is a serious problem. I frequently want to refer them to various non-Chinese websites for basic research tools, but end up having to make PDFs of the site for them (if I can that is), or just forgetting about it. I am not personally suffering for this, but they are.