VPN's for use in China - are there any good choices other than Nord?

[bpc]

I was there two years ago just after they finally came out of lockdown, had Nord and ExpressVPN, but gave up on hotel wifi completely. I'd intended to buy a local esim for my phone to have a local number (makes life with alipay etc. a whole lot easier, or at least did then), but hadn't done my research and didn't realise you can't get local esims within china, only physical ones - I still had a Telstra physical one at that point and couldn't switch once I was there. I used Nomad for my data esim but it was on I think China Mobile from memory, had to use VPNs, constantly switching servers doing the whackamole thing. Didn't know about the outside gateway thing, filing that one away now.

 

[SYD]

But... it us unlimited data, right? So, useful for heavier data usage people.

Yes, plus many other providers also have "unlimited"* plans now. Which are all pretty expensive - if works paying, probably good value - since wifi is close to useless.

*there's usually a "fare use" clause and the speed get's throttled after X GB / day usage (or something like that).

As mentioned before, Optus, Vodafone $5 pd roaming is actually competitive for China, for short trips and you need a lot of data.

I'd intended to buy a local esim for my phone to have a local number (makes life with alipay etc. a whole lot easier, or at least did then), but hadn't done my research and didn't realise you can't get local esims within china, only physical ones

I get the impression that getting a local China phone number is a thing of the past also? No drama registering AliPay and Didi with an Oz number.

A few tour operators contacted me via Whatsapp and Trip.com app has a message function - so the airport driver was able to send a pic of the car/"Mr SYD" sign etc.

 

[Justinf]

If you can use data roaming then that will work and you won't need a VPN.
Optus charges $5 a day for 3GB and routes the ISP via Australia and therefore passes the Great Firewall.
If you can't do that, I found LetsVPN to work seamlessly.
I used a combination of both data roaming and LetsVPN.

 

[anat0l]

Yes, plus many other providers also have "unlimited"* plans now. Which are all pretty expensive - if works paying, probably good value - since wifi is close to useless.

*there's usually a "fare use" clause and the speed get's throttled after X GB / day usage (or something like that).

I paid $58 for 11 days on Holafly. That's a bit more than $5 per day, but it is unlimited data.

My usage logs say I've used 8.63GB over 2 and a bit days now. If there's a throttle I haven't felt it hard yet.

Relative to the international packs I could have bought from my telco Tangerine, the costs are very comparable. But of course I have no phone calls or SMS, and since my Tangerine is an eSIM and I have a Samsung S22+, I can only have one eSIM active at a time, so that's a bit inconvenient (though could have been accounted for with some forward planning).

 

[elanshin]

I get the impression that getting a local China phone number is a thing of the past also? No drama registering AliPay and Didi with an Oz number.

I think I've mentioned, for many critical things its fine. However for some convenience things foreign numbers fail to work. That could include setting up ab account with a Tea chain so you can order in advance and pickup immediately. Nothing, that's a necessity, but lots of convenience things.

 

[SYD]

I think I've mentioned, for many critical things it’s fine. However for some convenience things foreign numbers fail to work. That could include setting up ab account with a Tea chain so you can order in advance and pickup immediately. Nothing, that's a necessity, but lots of convenience things.

Yes, I can imagine a regular business traveller would benefit from a local number but a one-off tourist visit probably isn’t worth the hassle.