Accessing Canvas in China

[THEODORVANDER]

To whom it may concern,

I am currently busy with an online masters through Falmouth University and I am concerned that when I start working in CHina in August my access will be restricted/difficult due to their internet restrictions.

Is there any way to circumnaviate this? Would it be about trying to use a VPN?

I look forward to your response.

Regards,

Theodor van der Merwe

[RecycledElectro]

Before using a VPN in China, check the legality. I have no idea of their laws, but if their laws say a website has to be blocked, then getting around that is probably a bad idea.

To see if the website is accessible, ask someone in China to go to that website and see if they can use it. Since you will be working in China, you probably know someone there who will spend 15 minutes helping you.

I wonder if your future employer could give you a VPN tunnel into the Internet in their local area so you could test it? That might be too much hassle.

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi @THEODORVANDER -

You have good questions! I'll do my best to provide some insights. 

If you'd like to preview your experience, you can always use GreatFire.org before arriving in China

What's the problem with users in China accessing Canvas?
When a user within China accesses Canvas hosted outside of China, the user's experience will often be slow and unpredictable.

Most Canvas institutional customers are hosted on AWS in their respective region (e.g. US in the US, Australia in Australia). If users outside of the hosting region try to access Canvas, there can be slowdowns in page load times simply due to the geographical distance from the host. Since we do not yet host Canvas in China, this causes slowdown for users within China.

Also, the Chinese government's firewall is the most pernicious culprit of connectivity slowdowns or failures for services hosted outside of China. This so-called Great Firewall of China filters, blocks, or throttles websites and services for pretty much everyone within China. For example, bandwidth in/out of China is intentionally throttled at the edges of the Chinese networks. We've seen, for example, cross-border traffic throttled to 1.5Mbps to 2Mbps, or even DNS-poisoned.

While Canvas is not filtered or blocked by The Great Firewall, Canvas page load times will still be affected by throttling. Anecdotally, we've heard that some pages take up to several minutes to load, some pages may time out, some parts of pages may not load, or even that Canvas works fine. Super unpredictable.

Further, while core third-party services like BigBlueButton are not blocked, some third-party services that connect through Canvas may not work at all (e.g. Google Suite and Vimeo) if these are blocked. Other services may work today, but not tomorrow.

What can you expect while accessing Canvas in China?

In general, users within China should expect slower page load times, sometimes to the point of timing out. Users within China should expect performance to vary depending on a variety of  "last-mile" factors, such as end-user’s location, time of access (peak/non-peak), etc. 

Can customers use a VPN in China?

Yes, but Instructure does not recommend use of VPNs to Chinese users within China. 

A VPN, which a user would install on their computer or device, re-routes their internet traffic through different servers. This can help a user avoid the Chinese firewall's filtering, blocking, and throttling services that gum up the works. 

VPNs are generally illegal in China, and Instructure would never recommend something that could get our users in trouble. 

Some Chinese students at Chinese universities may have access to an institution-provided VPN, but this is unpredictable.

It's also generally accepted that the Chinese government maintains subscriptions to a wide array of VPN providers to sniff and blacklist their exit node IP and/or domain name, which can prevent successful connection to the VPN in the first place.