Prepaid mobile Internet in China
There are two operators in the Chinese market: China Mobile and China Unicom. Both are state-owned and I had heard that China Unicom might have a better network so I decided to look for their SIM cards.
Obtaining a SIM card was easier than I thought as right on Shenzen railway station there was a booth selling SIM cards. I picked one that had the letters "500M" and "3G" printed on it, the price was 100 yuan (around 12 euro). The SIM was a mini-SIM but the guy working at the booth had a cutter to make it a micro-SIM to fit in my phone. I didn't have to fiddle around with any of the settings but the connection worked right away.
I was really surprised that during our stay there was HSDPA/HSDPA+ network even in the small villages away from big cities. We were in southern China where there are a lot of mountains and big hills so I guess they utilize them for good network coverage, meaning that in other parts of China 3G network might not be as widely available. The connection speed seemed decent, but don't take my word for it as the services that I use mostly, Facebook and Google (search, Maps, Gmail, Google+) were blocked/limited in China so it was hard to tell. For some reason the data connection stopped working during the fourth day, but I was too busy traveling to Vietnam that day to care.
A few things to consider when getting mobile Internet in China:
- Lack of support. All the product description and documentation is in Chinese only, the only "English" you get is the technical terms printed on product packaging (3G, LTE, 500M). Generally no one in China speaks English, trying to ask the small vendors for info isn't even worth trying, going to an official China Telecom/China Unicom store might help you find someone who can answer "yes" or "no" to very simple questions, but for example trying to enquire about data transfer allowance would be pointless. Also all operator messages (SMS) are in Chinese only and no operator has any kind of support web site in English.
- Internet censorship (aka. The Great Firewall Of China). Facebook has been completely blocked since 2008 or so, also Twitter, Livejournal, YouTube and many other sites are not accessible. During our stay which happened to coincide with 25th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the government had limited/blocked most of Google's services too - Gmail worked but it was very slow (sending an e-mail using the Android client took ~10 minutes), Google search didn't work at all, Google Maps worked OK, Google+ (I use it for backing up my mobile phone photos) didn't work, as didn't Play Store. The locals use VPN for routing their traffic through a proxy located in another country, but I'd recommend obtaining it before entering the country as getting VPN installed and running can be hard when already busy with the other travelling related stuff.
- Unpredictability. Like in my case the connection just died on me after a few days (only upstream data was active), and this was the day when we were traveling to Vietnam and there were some unexpected things happening (buses getting canceled etc.) and I really could have used the Internet to find out about stuff, but no. It's a mystery why it all of a sudden didn't work as I was nowhere near the date allowance limit, one explanation can be that the syncing services on my phone (Facebook, Google, Twitter) that couldn't get through (it seems like the government firewall just drops the TCP packets) were somehow constantly eating the data allowance and so it reached the limit. Anyway, I was too busy with other things on our travel day to care. So always have an offline backup plan, for example Open Street Map offline maps downloaded and important web pages (bus/train schedules etc.) saved locally to your device.
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