Traveling to Shanghai for a couple of days next month and looking for VPN’s to get past The Great Firewall of China. Does AT&T ActiveArmor work or should I look into others?
I wouldn’t expect it to work on local public WiFi. If you use your AT&T SIM/eSIM for roaming you’ll bypass their DPI due to how roaming works.
(All of what I say is from the last time I was there)
It seems like when I was there it depended on the carrier. China Unicom seemed “less strict” on VPN usage. I doubt the ActiveArmor thing will work at all there. My torguard VPN wouldn’t work either until I asked them and they gave me a specific IP I had to manually enter. My home VPN system also worked really well. In shanghai, it seems like everything worked better but when I went into the more “rural” areas it stopped working as well, especially on China Mobile. China Unicom though the VPN always worked. I expect VPNs will be more difficult to use because they had those protests and I assume they are going to have silent crack downs occurring everywhere which includes cracking down on VPN usage. As the other user said if you roam with AT&T there then you’ll bypass it all as well.
Should also say those who provide internet in the country are basically the same who provide cell phone coverage. So my point stands on both wired and wireless. I just could never really figure out why as China Mobile was supposedly larger but Unicom more “VPN friendly”… I assume all their connections route their the same systems though so no idea why the difference.