Introduction#
This is the first article in the VPS selection series, done at the request of a group of friends.
There may be some biases in the content, so please forgive me and point out any issues.
I won't say how to solve the problem, but rather "you're right, but I won't change".
Where does the data go?#
The civilian network exits in mainland China are concentrated in the following cities:
- Shanghai
- Beijing
- Guangzhou
There is a very rare chance of seeing the CN2 node in Urumqi, Xinjiang, and certain South Asian routes from Chengdu, but these are not the magical nodes that ordinary people can see in the response data when running tracert.
Exit City: Shanghai#
Shanghai, a city with countless reputations, serves as the outlet for the Yangtze River and also handles the internet traffic from the Yangtze River Basin.
The economic scale of the Yangtze River Basin has created a considerable demand for outbound data traffic, so the network convergence layer of the national backbone network in Shanghai starts to shake or even drop packets during peak hours.
Shanghai's location at the easternmost point of East China has made it the starting point for multiple trans-Pacific submarine cables, reaching the entire Asia-Pacific region: Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and even the US West Coast.
Exit City: Beijing#
As the capital of China and a key location in the North China Plain, Beijing is responsible for aggregating and integrating data traffic from North China, the three northeastern provinces, and northwest provinces such as Inner Mongolia.
As the political center of China with a "northern" geographical feature, Beijing does not handle traffic aggregation and submarine cable landing like Shanghai. It mainly serves as a transit and aggregation point for traffic. The depth of the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea further limits the choice of submarine cable landing stations.
Therefore, Beijing mainly handles the traffic transmission of land cables in the European direction and network traffic processing for some areas of South Korea and Japan.
Exit City: Guangzhou#
Guangzhou, a gathering place of nine dragons, is located in the Pearl River Delta and is responsible for integrating data traffic from the southwest region, Guangdong, and Fujian.
As the earliest region to undergo reform and opening up in China, Guangzhou has a rich connection with Hong Kong. With Hong Kong's early special status and excellent international traffic export, Guangzhou occupies a significant position in the national network topology.
Guangzhou mainly handles traffic in the direction of Hong Kong, South Asia, and some Asia-Pacific regions. In some special cases, it handles traffic in the European direction.
Where does the data go#
The number of POP points opened by domestic operators for civilian networks is quite limited, with only a few in each continent.
Americas#
The Americas can be divided into North America and South America, and further into the United States and other countries. China's POPs in the Americas are concentrated on the west coast of the United States, close to China.
As the birthplace of the modern internet, North America has a considerable number of Tier 1 ISPs that have set up their POPs and backbones here. Therefore, China has a significant amount of bandwidth with North America, and the three major operators have purchased transit from North American Tier 1 ISPs as a supplement to their own networks.
The POP points on the west coast of the United States are as follows:
-
Los Angeles. LAX, as the oldest data exchange center on the west coast of North America, has a large number of submarine cables landing here. This has made LAX one of the important POPs for the three major operators in North America.
-
San Jose. SJC, as an emerging network center in the western United States, has many newly built submarine cables and data centers landing here. This has led the three major operators to deploy high-capacity POPs and peer nodes here. Cloudflare also has over 100Gbps of interconnection capacity with the three major operators in SJC.
-
Seattle. An important network node in the northwestern United States, with a similar network status to Los Angeles. Early Japan-US submarine cables landed in Seattle, making it one of the North American network centers with the lowest latency to connect to the Asia-Pacific region.
Japan#
The landing points for submarine cables in Japan are relatively limited, mainly concentrated in Tokyo and Osaka. Japan's major network operators have similarities with mainland China, with their backbone resources mainly controlled by NTT, KDDI, IIJ, and SoftBank.
Perhaps due to some unclear political and economic relationships or behind-the-scenes deals, Japanese operators are among the few overseas ISPs that have self-operated POPs in mainland China. At the same time, the high-quality network interconnection between Japanese operators and Chinese operators is quite remarkable (IIJ and AS4837 even have completely equal interconnection, and it is said that you can see magical routes like IIJ->AS4837->AS9929->AS10099).
NTT, as one of the few Tier 1 ISPs in Asia, has expanded its backbone network's reach in the world through interconnection with Chinese operators, despite its "beautiful" nickname.
The main POPs are:
-
Tokyo. Tokyo is considered the de facto capital and is internationally recognized as the only metropolis in Japan. The favorable hydrology of Tokyo Bay has created favorable conditions for submarine cable landing.
-
Osaka. If Tokyo is considered the center of Kanto, then Osaka is the center of Kansai. Osaka sees Tokyo's long history of network development as a pile of feces. Osaka mainly creates favorable landing conditions for newly built submarine cables.
Southeast Asia#
When it comes to the two network centers in Southeast Asia, most Chinese netizens should be familiar with them. One is the city closely connected to China's development - Hong Kong, and the other is the center of South Asia's economy and oil industry, the pearl of the Malacca Strait, a shipping hub - Singapore.
As two cities located by the sea, both Singapore and Hong Kong have a large number of submarine cable landings. Due to geographical reasons, Singapore mainly serves as a transit hub for countries around the South China Sea, while Hong Kong serves as China's earliest gateway to the world. Through land-based submarine cables entering Hong Kong via the Luohu Port, Hong Kong handles a large amount of outbound data from the mainland and has also become an entry point for Pacific countries to connect to Europe with the lowest latency through land-based submarine cables on the world island.
The main POPs are:
-
Hong Kong. As the current special administrative region of China, Hong Kong has a unique network status. However, the monopoly of interconnection resources in this region by the three major operators has resulted in extremely high prices for mainland direct connection lines.
-
Singapore. As the only super-sized network center in South Asia in the past, the huge demand for data centers has overwhelmed the region. As a result, many so-called Singapore servers have been placed in the neighboring area of Johor.
Europe#
Although China and Europe do not seem to be very far apart geographically, there are many Central Asian countries and various geographical obstacles in between. Therefore, the interconnection between Asia and Europe was initially transmitted through submarine cables. This also led to the first two POP nodes being located in the UK and the Netherlands...
With the activation of the Asia-Europe land-based submarine cables, new POPs were placed at the crossroads of Europe, Germany.
The network quality of interconnection in Europe is generally good, so there is not much difference. If there is any difference, it would be the UK and others, not that the UK is particularly good, but rather that it is relatively poor.
Preview#
The next article will analyze different routing choices and some strange pitfalls.