Having problem with China websites

[SeanPC]

Hi,

I'm using Singtel Fiber and having problem accessing China websites recently. May I know is there anyone same as me? What is the problem and solution? Thanks.

 

[miloaisdino]

hi pls refer to https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/...ng-clinic-4/singtel-1-gbps-fibre-5930834.html

singtel does not buy transit / let residential customers use the transit bought from China Telecom eg CN2. hence there will be bound to have severe issues such as 200-600ms ping, ~10% packet loss to sites on china telecom.

yr best option is to change isp or get a china vpn (with china unicom/china mobile servers)

 

[SeanPC]

hi pls refer to https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/...ng-clinic-4/singtel-1-gbps-fibre-5930834.html

singtel does not buy transit / let residential customers use the transit bought from China Telecom eg CN2. hence there will be bound to have severe issues such as 200-600ms ping, ~10% packet loss to sites on china telecom.

yr best option is to change isp or get a china vpn (with china unicom/china mobile servers)

Hi,

thanks for the reply. previously i also have the same problem. it goes off by itself after awhile. I still under contract. Cant change in the near future. Can feedback to Singtel and whether they can do anything? Thanks

 

[xiaofan]

Hi,

I'm using Singtel Fiber and having problem accessing China websites recently. May I know is there anyone same as me? What is the problem and solution? Thanks.

Which website? It may not be SingTel problem. You can list down the websites so that others can try as well.

Sometimes it is because your IP got blacklisted by certain websites. Then after sometime your dynamic IP got changed and then the problem got fixed.

Using a VPN may well fix your issue as well.

 

[SeanPC]

Which website? It may not be SingTel problem. You can list down the websites so that others can try as well.

Sometimes it is because your IP got blacklisted by certain websites. Then after sometime your dynamic IP got changed and then the problem got fixed.

Using a VPN may well fix your issue as well.

i can enter taobao website but search will have problem. Can change the dynamic ip by restarting the ont and router? Thanks

 

[xiaofan]

i can enter taobao website but search will have problem. Can change the dynamic ip by restarting the ont and router? Thanks

You can try but that may or may not work.

If you have an older SingTel router, just switch to that old router and then put back the current router. This will sure work in terms of changing the dynamic IP address. Make sure you do not switch more than this, if not you will get into trouble.

Or if your router supports changing the MAC address, that will work as well.

Still in this case, it may or may not related to your IP. To confirm if it is SingTel Fibre problem or not, you can also try using your mobile phone data connection to see if that works or not.

BTW, my wife is a heavy Taobao user at home and she has no issues with SingTel Fibre. But she is using the mobile app on iPhone. You may want to check if you can use the mobile app over wifi.

Ref: same issue
https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/...roblem-accessing-china-website-6059148-3.html

Solution: you can try changing DNS server or VPN or things like Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 mobile app which changes your DNS server.

 

[xiaofan]

hi pls refer to https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/...ng-clinic-4/singtel-1-gbps-fibre-5930834.html

singtel does not buy transit / let residential customers use the transit bought from China Telecom eg CN2. hence there will be bound to have severe issues such as 200-600ms ping, ~10% packet loss to sites on china telecom.

yr best option is to change isp or get a china vpn (with china unicom/china mobile servers)

If it is related to routing, then all SingTel users will get affected, right?

Edit to add:
What you said is certainly true with regard to routing.

Taobao headquarter is at Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Just tried out SpeedTest to China Telecom Hangzhou SpeedTest server and ping value is at 400+ ms.

Ping value for China Unicom Hangzhou SpeedTest server is at 95ms.

Ping value for China Mobile Hangzhou SpeedTest server is 100ms.

As an experiment, I use AJS China VPN to connect to a China Unicom server in Hangzhou (app says 81ms ping), then I did the SpeedTest again with the China Telecom Hangzhou SpeedTest server, ping value reduced to 86ms.

On the other hand, China Telecom is dominant in southern China so majority of the AJS server in Zhejiang province are with China Telecom. So it is possible that Taobao servers will be more likely to use China Telecom. But it is a huge company so I will think they will distribute the data centre servers across the three major telecom companies.

 

[miloaisdino]

If it is related to routing, then all SingTel users will get affected, right?

Edit to add:
What you said is certainly true with regard to routing.

Taobao headquarter is at Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Just tried out SpeedTest to China Telecom Hangzhou SpeedTest server and ping value is at 400+ ms.

Ping value for China Unicom Hangzhou SpeedTest server is at 95ms.

Ping value for China Mobile Hangzhou SpeedTest server is 100ms.

As an experiment, I use AJS China VPN to connect to a China Unicom server in Hangzhou (app says 81ms ping), then I did the SpeedTest again with the China Telecom Hangzhou SpeedTest server, ping value reduced to 86ms.

On the other hand, China Telecom is dominant in southern China so majority of the AJS server in Zhejiang province are with China Telecom. So it is possible that Taobao servers will be more likely to use China Telecom. But it is a huge company so I will think they will distribute the data centre servers across the three major telecom companies.

haha yes it is even said that taobao has local caches/cdn here in sg!

 

[bert64]

Taobao is an interesting one...

Their main www.taobao.com site uses their own CDN:

$ host www.taobao.com
www.taobao.com is an alias for www.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com.
www.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com has address 47.246.1.233
www.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com has address 47.246.1.234

It redirects to world.taobao.com (i assume because i'm visiting from outside china), which is also hosted by the same CDN:

$ host world.taobao.com
world.taobao.com is an alias for world.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com.
world.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com has address 47.246.1.234
world.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com has address 47.246.1.233

However, when you use the search option it goes to s.taobao.com, which is hosted separately:

$ host s.taobao.com
s.taobao.com is an alias for v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.
v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com is an alias for v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com.
v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com has address 106.11.15.99
v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com has IPv6 address 2401:b180:2000:20::29
v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com has IPv6 address 2401:b180:2000:10::2d

The route to the first two is quite fast, around 3ms which suggests it's cached locally. The route to the third is much slower, which makes sense as search results wouldn't be so easily cachable. So the front page is cached locally while the search page routes to their servers in china.

Also of interest, the search page is reachable via both ipv6 and legacy ipv4 - on singtel you probably don't have ipv6 unless you've explicitly requested it.
In the instance of this search page, the ipv4 address goes to address space owned by taobao while the ipv6 goes to address space registered to alibaba so there's some kind of asymmetric configuration there although i can't comment on why they might do that.

When you have a dual stack configuration your machine will try both with a slight preference for ipv6, however if ipv6 is unreachable or very slow it will fail over to legacy ipv4 so you'd gain a little redundancy here.

 

[xiaofan]

So looks like there is a real issue here with some SingTel Fibre Internet users.

Anyway, I just tried Taobao website on our family Windows 10 laptop (we do not use it for Taobao) and I need to whitelist many sites in my Pi-hole to get it working. But it is working.

Indeed web version uses very different servers versus the mobile app versions. For example "s.taobao.com" (eventually goes to some sub domains of alicdn.com) does not seem to appear in the log for mobile app (usually sub domains of m.taobao.com), but it is used for web version.

FYI my dynamic public IP is 121.7.xx.xx now.

Edit to add: since my Pi-hole is not using SingTel DNS so I also tested without Pi-Hole SingTel DNS and it is still working.

 

[xiaofan]

Indeed ping value is very different, testing from my mobile phone.

Note: using SingTel DNS and not my Pi-hole DNS hosting on the free Google Cloud in USA.

$ ping -c 4 www.taobao.com
PING www.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com (47.246.1.233) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 47.246.1.233: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=4.56 ms
64 bytes from 47.246.1.233: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=4.93 ms
64 bytes from 47.246.1.233: icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=4.70 ms
64 bytes from 47.246.1.233: icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=9.04 ms

--- www.taobao.com.danuoyi.tbcache.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3067ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.567/5.812/9.048/1.873 ms

$ ping -c 4 s.taobao.com
PING v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com (106.11.94.18) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 106.11.94.18: icmp_seq=1 ttl=9 time=292 ms
64 bytes from 106.11.94.18: icmp_seq=2 ttl=9 time=498 ms
64 bytes from 106.11.94.18: icmp_seq=3 ttl=9 time=420 ms
64 bytes from 106.11.94.18: icmp_seq=4 ttl=9 time=340 ms

--- v6-sh-sz-zb.wagbridge.alibaba.taobao.com.gds.alibabadns.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 292.437/388.025/498.276/78.399 ms

 

[xiaofan]

SingTel 6rd IPv6 is worse.

Tested two times with 25% packet loss.

$ ping6 -c 4 s.taobao.com
PING s.taobao.com(2401:b180:2000:20::29) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=78 time=747 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=78 time=668 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=78 time=589 ms

--- s.taobao.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 3 received, 25% packet loss, time 3000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 589.595/668.311/747.332/64.399 ms

$ ping6 -c 4 s.taobao.com
PING s.taobao.com(2401:b180:2000:20::29) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=78 time=521 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=78 time=552 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=78 time=523 ms

--- s.taobao.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 3 received, 25% packet loss, time 3002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 521.228/532.340/552.660/14.401 ms

 

[bert64]

SingTel 6rd IPv6 is worse.

Tested two times with 25% packet loss.

$ ping6 -c 4 s.taobao.com
PING s.taobao.com(2401:b180:2000:20::29) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=78 time=747 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=78 time=668 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=78 time=589 ms

--- s.taobao.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 3 received, 25% packet loss, time 3000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 589.595/668.311/747.332/64.399 ms

$ ping6 -c 4 s.taobao.com
PING s.taobao.com(2401:b180:2000:20::29) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=78 time=521 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=78 time=552 ms
64 bytes from 2401:b180:2000:20::29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=78 time=523 ms

--- s.taobao.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 3 received, 25% packet loss, time 3002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 521.228/532.340/552.660/14.401 ms

Yeah it seems the IPv6 takes a completely different route with considerably worse peering. That said the presence of dual stack is still a significant benefit, as the packet loss will likely cause it to try and fail over to ipv4 - but in the event that ipv4 isn't working at all (as seems to be the case for the original poster) it should still work over ipv6, albeit slowly in this case.

 

[miloaisdino]

route:
singtel -> stix -> hk via ST backbone -> chinaunicom (china169) -> blackhole -> taobao

 

[xiaofan]

route:
singtel -> stix -> hk via ST backbone -> chinaunicom (china169) -> blackhole -> taobao

So your IP also starts with 121.7, same as mine.

Do you have problems with Taobao web version despite the high ping value?

One thing is that in your case, it at least does not go through China Telecom.

 

[miloaisdino]

So your IP also starts with 121.7.

Do you have problems with Taobao web version despite the high ping value?

nope! no problems

 

[xiaofan]

nope! no problems

That is why I am puzzled.

If we attribute the issue to high ping due to bad routing, then all of us should be affected. But apparently only some SingTel users are affected.

It could be because they might be so unfortunate to go through even worse routing (say through China Telecom) due to different IP address segment or different Taobao server locations.

Simple ping and traceroute may be able to check whether the hypothesis is correct.

 

[snowwolf13]

Taobao is generally ok. ST->China high latency is not the only problem as it usually comes with high packet lost as well. But it depends on the site/dest IP.

ST (219.X.X.X) -> apicn.hualaikeji.com (120.92.43.182)
--- apicn.hualaikeji.com ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 80 packets received, 20% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 378.523/378.923/382.962 ms

Used to run a Aliyun (SG) server for Xiaomi iot because of the lag.

From ST-> apicn.hualaikeji.com

From ST -> Aliyun SG(VPN)-> apicn.hualaikeji.com. No prize for guessing when I discontinued the the Aliyun server.

 

[miloaisdino]

Taobao is generally ok. ST->China high latency is not the only problem as it usually comes with high packet lost as well. But it depends on the site/dest IP.

ST (219.X.X.X) -> apicn.hualaikeji.com (120.92.43.182)
--- apicn.hualaikeji.com ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 80 packets received, 20% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 378.523/378.923/382.962 ms

Used to run a Aliyun (SG) server for Xiaomi iot because of the lag.

From ST-> apicn.hualaikeji.com

From ST -> Aliyun SG(VPN)-> apicn.hualaikeji.com. No prize for guessing when I discontinued the the Aliyun server.

from my azure server!

azureadmin@azure:~$ ping apicn.hualaikeji.com
PING apicn.hualaikeji.com (120.92.43.182) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 120.92.43.182 (120.92.43.182): icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=74.0 ms
64 bytes from 120.92.43.182 (120.92.43.182): icmp_seq=2 ttl=44 time=74.3 ms
64 bytes from 120.92.43.182 (120.92.43.182): icmp_seq=3 ttl=44 time=74.3 ms
64 bytes from 120.92.43.182 (120.92.43.182): icmp_seq=4 ttl=44 time=74.3 ms
64 bytes from 120.92.43.182 (120.92.43.182): icmp_seq=5 ttl=44 time=74.3 ms
^C
--- apicn.hualaikeji.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 74.068/74.288/74.393/0.319 ms

 

[Litash]

I'm using ViewQwest and having China websites issue as well. My WeChat is just cannot connect to the network at all most of the time in the past 3 days.

When Wechat was disconnected, Steam was also unable to connect to the Friends network...

For Taobao, the website front page can be partially loaded, some resources are failed to load. If you do search in Taobao, will take a while to load or cannot load at all.

I thought it was an issue from ViewQwest, now when I see Singtel user is also facing same issue, I feel better...