China is already the home to the largest internet community globally with 940 million users and over 80% mobile penetration rate, yet it is still growing fast. Revenue for Internet services increases at a rapid 25.4% in 2020, reaching $803.1 billion. From 2016 to 2021, internet traffic in China will grow 3-fold, at a CAGR of 26%. In March 2020, internet users in China spent about five hours per day online. However, for international companies trying to get into the market, the Chinese internet is notoriously hard to understand. In this blog post, we will talk about the No. 3 best practices of content delivery into China.
When considering how to deliver your content to China, it’s critical to understand your users’ geographical distribution to the city and ISP-level. China has very unique network environment where a few ISPs dominate the whole network.
This pie chart shows the ISP market share in China.
A few state-owned ISPs control the market, and the competition among them is quite intense. One unique outcome of their competition is that they have minimal peering with each other. This means data transmission between ISP suffers from significant network latency.
As you can see from this chart, while in Beijing, the network latency is only 1.5ms within the China Unicom network, the latency is almost 10 times when going across to another ISP.
To optimize the delivery performance based on your user distribution, the first thing you need to do if move your origin servers (or content library) closer to the end-users. If your content library lives on public cloud like Google Cloud or AWS, their Tokyo or Hong Kong region would be an excellent option. At the same time, make sure set up the backup origin and error-based failover to minimize the disruption in order to maintain the viewing quality.
Furthermore, it is crucial to work with a local content delivery network, like BaishanCloud, who has resources across Mainland China directly connecting to all major and smaller ISPs to guarantee your website performance.
The China internet landscape is complicated and can be hard to navigate if you don’t know the intricacies. That’s why finding a reliable and experienced local content delivery partner can save you lots of trouble. From increasing delivery performance to helping with local compliance, a trusted China content delivery network can help you avoid pitfalls and save costs while you can focus on building your services and content.
Find out more about this and related topics:
Find out about BaishanCloud’s China CDN
Read about the challenges of delivering content into China
Browse our blog posts about ICP and The Great Firewall
