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Characterizing Transnational Internet Performance and the Great Bottleneck of China

Authors:

J. Alex Halderman,

Haixin DuanAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, Volume 4, Issue 1

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3379479

Published: 27 May 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Transnational Internet performance is an important indication of a country's level of infrastructure investment, globalization, and openness. We conduct a large-scale measurement study of transnational Internet performance in and out of 29 countries and regions, and find six countries that have surprisingly low performance. Five of them are African countries and the last is mainland China, a significant outlier with major discrepancies between downstream and upstream performance. We then conduct a comprehensive investigation of the unusual transnational Internet performance of mainland China, which we refer to as the "Great Bottleneck of China''. Our results show that this bottleneck is widespread, affecting 79% of the receiver--sender pairs we measured. More than 70% of the pairs suffer from extremely slow speed (less than 1~Mbps) for more than 5 hours every day. In most tests the bottleneck appeared to be located deep inside China, suggesting poor network infrastructure to handle transnational traffic. The phenomenon has far-reaching implications for Chinese users' browsing habits as well as for the ability of foreign Internet services to reach Chinese customers.

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Cited By

Amich AEshete BYegneswaran VHoang NCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)DeResistorProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620384(2617-2633)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620384
Moura GHeidemann JHardaker WCharnsethikul PBulten JCeron JHesselman C(2022)Old but Gold: Prospecting TCP to Engineer and Live Monitor DNS AnycastPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_12(264-292)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_12
Man KZhou XQian ZKim YKim JVigna GShi E(2021)DNS Cache Poisoning Attack: Resurrections with Side ChannelsProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3460120.3486219(3400-3414)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460120.3486219

Index Terms

Characterizing Transnational Internet Performance and the Great Bottleneck of China
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems Volume 4, Issue 1

SIGMETRICS

March 2020

467 pages

EISSN:2476-1249

DOI:10.1145/3402934

Editors:
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University
,
Leana Golubchik
University of Southern California
,
Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota

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Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 27 May 2020

Online AM: 07 May 2020

Published in POMACS Volume 4, Issue 1

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Cited By

Amich AEshete BYegneswaran VHoang NCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)DeResistorProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620384(2617-2633)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620384
Moura GHeidemann JHardaker WCharnsethikul PBulten JCeron JHesselman C(2022)Old but Gold: Prospecting TCP to Engineer and Live Monitor DNS AnycastPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_12(264-292)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_12
Man KZhou XQian ZKim YKim JVigna GShi E(2021)DNS Cache Poisoning Attack: Resurrections with Side ChannelsProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3460120.3486219(3400-3414)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460120.3486219

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