First time working remotely from China and I followed most r/china comment suggestion to use Astrill VPN. I downloaded it but it seems to break down 2-3 times per hour and that’s unacceptable for me since I will be conducting zoom meetings.
I’m using only USA based VPN IP addresses since I want to emulate the internet environment like I was working back in USA.
I use StealthVPN, using TCP since Astrill says it’s more reliable, I run a speed test daily and only use the fastest IP address. I use Astrill on my M1 MacBook Air, iPhone 13, and iPad Air 5th gen.
the internet speed for all 3 devices is good enough for one way internet consumption, like web browsing and watching YouTube and Disney+, but I am worried about two way communication like calling using Google Voice and Zoom video meetings will constantly be dropped.
Is there something else I can be doing with Astrill VPN settings or going with a completely different option? My wife just setup WeChat Out calling on my phone so I can use that for international calling, but still need a stable solution for Zoom video meetings.
Astrill is highly overrated and overpriced, just use LetsVPN instead
Common wisdom is that “If it’s well known, it will be targeted.” That’s why is good to do your homework on other VPN alternatives. Obviously we can’t share other solutions out here since the moment it gets traction, it will be throttled.
Try letsvpn. It has worked better than astrill for me at a fraction of the price. I did have to get in touch with customer support and change some settings in windows at first, but had no problems on android and have like 300 Mbps download with 20-50ms ping on HK servers on windows now. I don’t ever remember astrill working that well (except maybe their even more expensive tiers). Astrill really is a POS company, overcharging and under delivering in my experience.
You know Zoom isn’t blocked in China, right?
these days astril has been quite slow
I’m also considering Google Fi since it’s compatible with my iPhone 13 and can share hotspot with my Mac and iPad.
Anything that works well now is a temporary solution. Trying to chase down a fix will be an ongoing issue though if you’re lucky things will work well for a few months in between periods of time where there are issues again. Generally as important political events happen the issues will increase.
Speed test is largely meaningless. Choose locations based on geography.
Use UDP, it’s slower but more reliable. Not sure why they said use TCP.
I get issues with wire guard / stealth protocols. Just use the standard one.
Generally you just need to find a server that works and stick with it till it doesn’t, that’s usually a solid 9 months. There’s balancing you need to do, some are great speed but have other issues.
VPN in china is a cat and mouse game. so things change and reliability varies.
best advice is only use vpn when you have to (i.e access blocked sites) other time just use normal internet (i.e video conferencing)
Just use letsvpn never had any issues
Find a v2ray or shadowsocks app and go to justmysocks to buy a vps for like $5 a month
The most popular servers get that from time to time. Try the alternative servers if you are aiming for a specific country.
Personally I have been using a certain set of servers for years and haven’t had them break that often. And if that happened I immediately jumped onto the other on my list.
Needless to say, it might as well be the local network connection.
For people using letsvpn, does international tiktok work? I use Astrill and it doesn’t for some reason. Or is it because of SIM card?
just figured it out tonight. But I use my gmail to log into zoom, so I still need VPN to use Zoom.
tried letsvpn and seems promising so far. very fast on phone, but somehow Macbook is slow. But if I use iphone + letsvpn + wifi to act as personal hotspot for my Macbook, the speed is very fast.