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 exit points 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 some South Asian routes in 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 Shanghai's national backbone network starts to shake and 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 and with its "northern" geographical characteristics, Beijing does not handle traffic aggregation and 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 cable landing stations.
Therefore, Beijing mainly handles the transmission of traffic to Europe and 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 implement reform and opening up policies in China, Guangzhou has a rich connection with Hong Kong. With Hong Kong's early special status in the international community and its excellent international traffic export, Guangzhou occupies a significant position in the national network topology.
Guangzhou's exit mainly handles traffic to Hong Kong, South Asia, and some Asia-Pacific directions. In some special cases, it may handle traffic to Europe.
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 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, 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 large number of submarine cables landing here. This has made 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 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.
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Seattle. An important network node in the northwest 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 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, with their backbone resources mainly controlled by 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 POPs in mainland China. At the same time, the high-quality 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 expanded its backbone network's reach in the world through interconnection with mainland Chinese operators, despite its "beautiful" nickname for its backbone network.
The main POPs are:
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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.
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Osaka. If Tokyo is considered the center of the Kanto region, then Osaka is the center of the Kansai region. The long history of network development in Tokyo may be seen as a pile of dung 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 economic and petroleum industry center of South Asia, 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 pass through the Luohu Port into Hong Kong, Hong Kong handles a large amount of outbound data from mainland China and has also become an entry point for Pacific region 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 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.
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Singapore. As the only super-sized network center in the South Asia region 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 has to be a distinction, it would be between 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.