Queen Mary University of London - China

Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has joint programmes with two universities in China: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) and Nanchang University (NCU). Nanchang is the capital of Jiangxi province in south-east China. Students are taught by a mix of lecturers from their own institution and from QMUL. At each institution there are a few thousand students enrolled on joint programme courses. They need to use QMUL’s virtual learning environment (VLE), which is based on Moodle, as well as QMUL email. The VLE is hosted in London (at ULCC) and the email is MS Office 365. At both locations the majority of access to the VLE and email is by students from their dorms, not from the main university buildings (lecture theatres etc.). The dorms are predominantly connected to the Internet via commercial ADSL connections rather than being part of the university network. Therefore they are mostly not connected via CERNET.

Using the VLE from the BUPT dorms (a mix of China Telecom and China Unicom ADSL connections) is fine. Traffic is generally routed to and from the UK via Germany on GTT’s network. Using the VLE from lecture theatres etc. is also fine, with traffic routed via CERNET and ORIENTplus (we worked with BUPT IT to add routes to ensure QMUL traffic was routed this way).

However, connectivity from NCU is problematic. We have found that from approx. 1100 to 2300 every day CST (China Standard Time) that connectivity is seriously degraded. This occurs at NCU and its dorms, and at hotels in Nanchang. In the dorms and hotels it appears that international traffic (traffic to locations outside China) is throttled between these times on a daily basis. Traffic to sites within China is usually unaffected. Our best guess is that the main Internet connectivity to the city of Nanchang is congested, and to help deal with that congestion some traffic is throttled, including all traffic to destinations outside China. It is also worth noting that the Chinese telcos may throttle connections in an attempt to charge for better connectivity. We do not know if this is true or not, but we have seen it mentioned, e.g. in the section titled “Speed throttling and bandwidth manipulation” at https://vpnreviewer.com/internet-vpn-china

We saw evidence of throttling/congestion from the main NCU buildings too, although Chinese traffic may also be affected there. The reason given for this by NCU’s IT department is that NCU’s CERNET connection is very congested, despite a recent upgrade. Our remote monitoring would indicate this is indeed the case.

So, our main concern is to improve the experience of accessing our London-based VLE from the dorms at NCU. 19% of the dorms are connected via campus wifi, so traffic will route via CERNET. The remainder are connected via a mix of commercial ADSL connections supplied by China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile (the latter supply landlines and broadband as well as mobile connectivity, despite their name). Therefore we need a service that will provide NCU students with a reasonably good experience when accessing our London-hosted VLE from their dorms. We realise that the experience will never be as good as using it in London, but if it can achieve similar levels to that experienced in Beijing then the students will be happy. We assume it will be somewhat complex because the solution must work for connections from the three main Chinese telcos, and from CERNET.