Which ISP should you choose in china?

Location

Location is important if you want good international network speed in china, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou so called 北上广 are the most developed cities in china, they have the best IT Infrastructure.

ISP

There are a lot of ISP in china, but the biggest three are China telecom, China unicom and China mobile(tietong).

Situation of Gehua歌华, Great Wall Broadband长城宽带, broadbandcommunication宽带通 , Founder broadband方正宽带 could not be summarized, simple rule is the more expensive the better.

Compare share of bandwidth and quality:

China telecom is better than China unicom in south china, China unicom is better than China telecom in north china.

On the whole, China telecom > China unicom > China mobile

If you want good international network speed (2015-02-23):

Live in Shanghai and using China telecom, pay 50 yuan 200 yuan (updated on 2015-04-01) more per month to use international boutique network国际精品网 is your best choice. There are too much international traffic, Shanghai telecom have network congestion, don’t use it. (update on 2015-08-13)

International boutique network 国际精品网 is back.: (update on 2021-02-10)

https://sh.189.cn/clhw/

Live in other cities,
China mobile is cheap and it has the most idle bandwidth to international network and it has equal upload and download speed in most places ,
(Fellas, I heared your voice on zhihu, updated on 2016-12-28)
China mobile’s fixed-line broadband user number is growing rapidly in recent years (75.51 million),  more than china unicom (75.472 million) via people
Now china mobile is not the clear winner.
but and it also has many problems:

  • a lot of TCP hijacking, DNS hijacking (Especially China tietong exit)
  • Expired files because of cache
  • no public IPv4 address
  • a lot of sites and IP been blocked temporary or permanent
  • …

Use China mobile with a proxy in Hong Kong or neighboring countries (Singapore, Japan etc) is your best choice still a good choice. (updated on 2016-12-28)
Use Shadowsocks over KCPTun to get rid of QoS restrictions is suggested. (updated on 2016-12-28)