The short version first: Primcast does not offer CN2 GIA. The rest of this page is what you get instead, measured on our own network. It covers the path into each of China's three big carriers, the city closest to China, a way to try the route from your own connection there before spending anything, and what happens when China blocks one of your addresses.
The first one decides whether the other four matter to you, so start there.
Think of China Telecom as having two front doors. The everyday one is ChinaNet (AS4134), often called 163, and any carrier in the world can deliver traffic to it. The premium one is CN2 (AS4809). A host that buys CN2 GIA pays extra so that traffic travels on CN2 both into China and back out again, and that is usually what a page promising “China-optimised” hosting has bought.
We deliver to China Telecom through Cogent, straight into ChinaNet. We have not bought CN2 for either direction, so nothing about our route is CN2 GIA. On 27 September 2026 we confirmed it on our New York and Bucharest routers and with traceroutes from San Francisco, Miami and Amsterdam. Every one of those paths reaches China Telecom at 202.97.x.x, which is ChinaNet, and not one of them passes through 59.43.x.x, which is where CN2 lives.
| Carrier | What sits in between |
|---|---|
| China Telecom | Cogent hands over to ChinaNet (AS4134) from every city we have; CN2 is never used. |
| China Unicom | Lumen or Cogent carry it to AS4837 from New York; Cogent does so from Bucharest. |
| China Mobile | Cogent hands over to CMI (AS58453), the carrier's own network outside China. |
So does it work? Yes. Outside busy hours, the delay you see is mostly just how far away the server is. In the evening in China, though, the ordinary international links get crowded, and latency rises and some packets drop. Paying to skip that crowd is the whole point of CN2 GIA. If your service cannot live with a slower evening, even occasionally, you need a CN2 GIA host for it, and we would sooner tell you than sell you the wrong thing.
No amount of money shortens the Pacific, so the city you choose matters. From San Francisco your traffic heads straight across the ocean; from New York it first has to cross America. Here are the times we got from all five of our locations on 27 September 2026, at half past five in the afternoon Beijing time, each the average of five pings.
| Location | China Telecom | China Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 134 ms | 245 ms |
| New York | 196 ms | 256 ms |
| Miami | 217 ms | 275 ms |
| Amsterdam | 255 ms | 213 ms |
| Bucharest | 276 ms | 273 ms |
A single afternoon is a snapshot, so read the ranking rather than the decimals. One surprise: China Mobile came back quicker from Amsterdam than from San Francisco. If your audience is mostly China Mobile, try both cities. China Unicom is missing because its servers simply ignored our pings; the speed tests below are the fair way to judge it.
What your users notice is the trip home, from their phone or office in China back to your server. China's carriers pick that route themselves, which is why CN2 GIA exists and why our routers cannot measure it for you. Measure it from China instead: on the carrier your users have, at the time of day they use you most.
Each of our locations runs a speed test you can open from anywhere. It is a real machine on that location's network, so a browser visit, a ping or a traceroute from a Chinese connection tells you what your users will see:
From a terminal it looks like this; Windows spells the second command tracert.
ping speedtest-sf.primcast.com traceroute speedtest-sf.primcast.com
Our looking glass covers the outbound half: give it a Chinese address and it pings, traces or looks up the BGP route from New York or Bucharest.
After that, nothing beats a real server. Order a ready one, put your own traffic on it through a Chinese evening or two, and if you are not happy, ask for your money back within three days of the server going live. You get the unused part back minus a 15% fee, as our refund policy spells out.
Run a server for Chinese users long enough and the Great Firewall may block its address. You can tell it apart from other problems: people inside China can still ping it, yet nothing that uses TCP connects, and everyone outside China reaches it fine. It is not something we did and your server is not broken.
Our answer is a new address. We give you a replacement from the same location and the same range, which means the same netmask and gateway, and we retire the blocked one. It costs nothing, provided you keep the same number of addresses. You put the new one on your network interface and update your DNS. No reinstall, no move to another box. Tell us the blocked address in live chat or in a ticket and we take it from there.
Be clear on what a new address cannot do. It lifts a block on the old number, but if the thing that got it blocked carries on, the firewall can block the new one as well. We also have no DDoS protection to sell, on any server; if your service draws attacks, run it behind a scrubbing provider or a CDN.
You do not need a new server because an address was blocked; a replacement address is quicker and free. Want another server anyway, bigger or somewhere else? That is simply a new order, with no charge for moving. Ready servers taken as they are carry no setup fee, apart from the entry M700 cartridge's $13, while a custom build has a single $29 setup charge. Billing for the new server starts when it goes live, and the old one runs until you cancel it, with five business days' notice, so plan a little overlap to move your files. Moving them is up to you.
Staying in the same location? Then we can normally bring your addresses along; just ask when you order. Moving cities means new addresses, because every location has ranges of its own.
There is no contract: you pay month by month. Pay for three months in advance and you save 5%, six months saves 10%, and twelve months, our longest option, saves 15%. Remote console access through HPE iLO, Dell iDRAC or the server's BMC comes free wherever the hardware supports it.
Short answers to what people planning a China service write to us about.
