Theories abound for overseas web access troubles

• Source: Global Times
• [03:15 May 18 2011]
• Comments

Global Voices Advocacy, a pressure group, said the interruption followed the use of "monitoring software on routers that direct Internet traffic within and across China's borders," the Guardian reported. It added that the new software appears to be able to detect large amounts of connections being made to overseas Internet locations.

Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, attributed the interruptions to Internet service providers' economic concerns. 

"Service providers have to pay the bill of the international Internet flow for their users. So there is incentive for the companies to discourage users to visit foreign websites," he said.

This view was echoed by Wei Wuhui, an IT technology and new media expert at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Roughly 20 percent of university students use VPNs to visit websites that are not accessible in the Chinese mainland, such as Facebook and Twitter, with that figure fast increasing, Wei said, adding that too many visits at once to these sites could cause blockages.

Fang said the intermittent access to the foreign sites may also be attributed to limited bandwidth being set aside for international traffic, as it currently stands at only around 1 terabyte, falling short of mounting domestic demand.

An anonymous official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declined to explain why foreign websites were frequently inaccessible a telephone interview with the Global Times, and instead urged users to "check their own technology problems and with the websites' servers on the first place."

The official referred the Global Times to the State Internet Information Office, a newly established department to administer both online publishing and Internet access management.

Calls to the office went unanswered Tuesday. The Internet Surveillance Department of Beijing Public Security Bureau said they were not aware of this matter.

Zhu Shanshan and Li Yanhui contributed to this story