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.
If I don't mention how to solve a problem, it means "you're right, but I won't change".
Where does the data go?#
The civilian network export in mainland China is concentrated in the following cities:
- Shanghai
- Beijing
- Guangzhou
There is a very rare chance of seeing the CN2 node exported from Urumqi, Xinjiang, and some South Asian direction routes exported from Chengdu, but these are not commonly seen in the response data of ordinary people's daily tracert.
Export City: Shanghai#
Shanghai, a city with countless reputations, serves as the outlet of the Yangtze River in reality and also bears the responsibility of internet traffic export in the Yangtze River Basin.
The economic scale of the Yangtze River Basin has also created a considerable demand for outbound data traffic, so the network convergence layer of the national backbone network in Shanghai almost starts to shake or even drop packets during peak hours.
Shanghai's location at the apex of East China has led multiple trans-Pacific submarine cables to start from Shanghai, reaching the entire Asia-Pacific region: Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and even the US West Coast.
Export City: Beijing#
As the capital of China and the key point of 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 and with its "northern" geographical feature, Beijing does not handle traffic aggregation and submarine cable landing like Shanghai. It basically only 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 in some areas of South Korea and Japan.
Export City: Guangzhou#
Guangzhou, a gathering place of nine dragons, is located in the Pearl River Delta and is responsible for integrating data traffic in the southwest region, Guangdong, and Fujian.
As the earliest region to implement reform and opening up in China, Guangzhou has a rich connection with Hong Kong. With the special international status of Hong Kong in the early days and its excellent international traffic export, Guangzhou occupies a significant position in the national topology.
Guangzhou's export mainly handles traffic in the direction of Hong Kong, South Asia, and some Asia-Pacific directions. In some special cases, it handles traffic in the European direction.
Where does the data go#
The number of POP points that mainland operators open to 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 if we go into more detail, it can be written as 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 setting up their POPs and backbones here. Therefore, the bandwidth between China and North America is quite large, 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:
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Los Angeles. LAX, as the oldest data exchange center on the west coast of North America, has a considerable number of submarine cables landing here. This also makes LAX one of the important POPs for the three major operators in North America.
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San Jose. SJC, as an emerging network center in the western United States, has a large number of 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.
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Seattle. An important network node in the northwest United States, it has 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 of submarine cables in Japan are relatively limited, mainly concentrated in Tokyo and Osaka. Japan's major network operators have similarities with mainland China, and their backbone resources are mainly concentrated in NTT, KDDI, IIJ, and SoftBank.
Perhaps due to some unclear political or behind-the-scenes transactions, Japanese operators are one of the few overseas ISPs that have self-operated POP points in mainland China. At the same time, the high quality of network interconnection between Japanese operators and mainland Chinese operators is a miracle (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 a well-known backbone network, and mainland operators also interconnect with NTT to expand the reach of their backbone networks in the world.
The main POPs are:
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Tokyo. Tokyo is considered the de facto capital and is recognized internationally as the only metropolitan administrative region in Japan. The good hydrology of Tokyo Bay has created favorable conditions for submarine cable landing.
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Osaka. If Tokyo is considered the center of Kanto, then Osaka is the center of Kansai. The long history of network development in Tokyo may be seen as a pile of shit mountains in Osaka. 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 - Hong Kong, and the other is the center of South Asia's economy and oil industry, the pearl of the Malacca Strait, a shipping gateway - Singapore.
As two cities located by the sea, both Singapore and Hong Kong have a large number of submarine cable landings. Based on geographical relations, 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 the land-based submarine cables that enter Hong Kong through the Luohu Port, Hong Kong handles a large amount of outbound data from the mainland and also becomes an entry point for Pacific regional countries to connect to Europe with the lowest latency through land-based submarine cables on the world island.
The main POPs are:
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Hong Kong. As the current special administrative region of China, it has a special network status. However, the monopoly of the three major operators on interconnection resources in this region has resulted in extremely high prices for mainland direct connection lines.
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Singapore. As the only super-large network center in South Asia in the past, the huge demand for data centers born from this has already overwhelmed the region. As a result, many so-called Singapore servers have been placed in the neighboring area of Johor.