Day 1: We visited Amelia at Beijing Normal University to get the internet set up. We visited two of the three major internet providers in Beijing (China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom). They both tell us that the fastest internet is through 3G from your mobile device aka a hotspot. We insiste on a landline, they say they cannot help us because Beihang is too far from BNU.
Day 2: Lulu from the foreign affairs department takes us to pay for the school’s internet. 70 RMB per month, speed unknown, activation time: 1 hour. We get home and test the speed: 0.5 Mbps. The internet is so slow that I can’t even check my email and periodically it just doesn’t work, like whenever I want to do anything it stops working.
Day 3: Start looking into 3rd party providers. Call the apartment manager for recommendation and she tells us to ask someone else. This is very typical in China, to simply pass you onto someone else so they don’t have to deal with your problem. We decide to use China Unicom because they seem to have the fastest coverage and visit a few stores, but they only sell cell phones
Day 4: I call the China Unicom hotline and they give me an address in which I can buy the internet. We went there. It was a DORM ROOM. Frustrated, we went to another China Unicom office nearby and they sent us to a grocery store. We were skeptical, but there was a sign outside. Inside however, there were no signs, so we asked and were pointed to a random lady wearing no uniform sitting next to a bunch of phones. I called the hotline again and the representative and this lady talked back and forth in Chinese and they sent us to another office. This time it was not a dorm room, so we were very happy! We waited for over 2 hours and were finally seen by a lady who told us that maybe we could have internet in our apartment. I had to press her asking how we could find out. She said we could have a shifu come to our apartment and check. She gave me his number and told me to have a Chinese friend help me call so I just asked her to make the call. The internet man was scheduled to come the next day in the morning.
Day 5: He arrived. Luckily, we happened to Skype with my mom at that exact minute and she helped us translate what he was saying. He told us that we couldn’t install internet because there was already a wire there. In order to remove it, we needed permission from our school, then apply to have the line removed with the registration office of internet lines, then wait for them to remove it, then apply for and register a new internet line, then wait a week for that to be installed. Realizing this would take at least a month, I cried, making the internet man uncomfortable and he left.
Finally the foreign affairs department got involved and Lily, the nice lady who picked Joey and I up at the airport at 1 am, asked her boss if they could remove the line.
Day 6: Her boss asked her boss if they could remove the line.
Day 7: Her boss’s boss asked her boss if they could remove the line.
Day 8: Her boss’s boss is very busy.
Day 9: Her boss’s boss says maybe depending on the cost, which the school would cover.
Day 10: They still don’t know what the cost is or what the speed would be or how long it will take.
Day 11: Oujiejie called and says that Unicom can install a line and made an appointment for us for that day. The internet man arrived with a PPOE(?) device and after a very frustrating round of phone call to Oujiejie and Lily for translation, he managed to install the device and get it to work. The speeds were only barely faster than before and it cost 1480 RMB for the year, but you pay later.
Day 14: Oujiejie calls and says the money man is coming in 10 minutes. Joey runs to the ATM, comes back, and we wait an hour. The money man arrives and I sign some forms, pay the money, and our neighbor helped us a bit with the forms.
Day 15: Still haven’t heard from the foreign affairs department.
Day 20: We receive permission to remove the line from the foreign affairs department, but decide not to because the PPOE device gradually got faster over time, but also occasionally completely stops work. This is remedied by Joey dropping the router on the floor.