Location: Wenling, Taizhou, Zhejiang.
Short version: I wasn’t happy with regular residential broadband anymore, so I had a dedicated mobile line installed. The plan is basically 100/90 Mbps, costs 2500 RMB per year, and comes with one fixed IPv4 address plus one fixed IPv6 /64 block. There’s no special international routing or other fancy optimization. It’s still PON access. Compared with home broadband, the main extra thing you’re really paying for is the fixed IP.
Why I bothered
Before this, I already had connections from all three major carriers:
China Telecom residential broadband (public IP, 500/40 Mbps, 169 RMB/month)China Unicom residential broadband (public IP, 300/50 Mbps, 10 RMB/month)China Mobile residential broadband (private IP, 100/30 Mbps, 0 RMB/month)
Even with all three in place, I still had three persistent problems:
- Moonlight streaming uses a lot of upstream bandwidth, and I was worried that would get flagged as PCDN traffic and throttled.
- Uploading files at 50 Mbps always felt slow.
- Whenever a dynamic IP changed, my WireGuard peers would disconnect and need manual reconnection.
Asking around about pricing
Unless stated otherwise below, all speeds refer to upload speed.
I first called 10086 and pressed 8, asked roughly what the pricing looked like, and got a quote range that seemed acceptable. So I asked them to register my information. After that, I was told a customer manager would contact me within one or two business days.
There was a small detour before that happened. While I was waiting, I also asked customer managers from Unicom and Telecom.
Telecom was exactly what you’d expect: 3600 RMB/year for 100 Mbps with a dynamic IP, and they made it clear that heavy upstream use could still trigger speed limits.
Unicom quoted 3000 RMB/year for 100 Mbps with a fixed IP, which sounded decent, but when I tried to keep asking for more details, their customer manager stopped replying altogether. Maybe I annoyed them.
When Mobile’s customer manager finally called, I mentioned Unicom’s price. His first reaction was that it was surprisingly cheap. Then he added me on WeChat and gave me two options:
2500 RMB/year for 90 Mbps with a fixed IP2200 RMB/year for 100 Mbps with a dynamic IP
He also said the offer might only be valid for a short time and could go up soon. I had originally planned to wait a few more months until I got back home to install it, but after hearing that, I rushed to register a sole proprietorship business license so I could qualify for the line. Zhejiang’s online government services were actually impressively fast—I finished everything online and had the license the same afternoon.
Once that was done, I submitted the installation request and booked it for Friday. The first month was free, and billing would start from the second month at 2500 RMB/year for 90 Mbps.
To be honest, I still suspect the “price will rise soon” part was just sales pressure to get me to install earlier.
The actual installation process
To make this happen, I got up at 5 a.m. on Friday and went home from school in Shaoxing. Then… nothing. By afternoon, no installer had contacted me. I had to keep pushing the customer manager before someone finally came out, took a look at the line, and left.
The access method is PON. We agreed to unplug my existing China Mobile residential broadband and reuse that fiber for the dedicated line’s ONT. The old residential line comes up again later.
The installer then told me it would still take around three days before the back-office staff finished the service provisioning, and only then could the line actually be installed.
That was a problem, because I had to go back to Shaoxing on Sunday.
So I went back to chasing the customer manager again, and finally, on Sunday morning, the installers came back and completed the job.
While configuring the ONT, one of them asked whether I wanted dynamic or static addressing. Static, obviously—if I wanted dynamic IP, I could have just taken the cheaper 2200 RMB/year 100 Mbps plan.
Once static was selected, they finished the setup quickly. They also nailed the ONT to the wall because, according to company policy, the cabling and hardware installation had to be kept tidy. After going through all the Mobile workflow steps and closing the work order, they handed me two wireless devices and left. I could probably have refused them, but these have to be returned when terminating the service.
After the installers left, the customer manager came over in person with the contract. I signed it and paid the 2500 RMB on the spot using Mobile’s payment QR code. At that point, the physical installation part was done.
IPv6 setup and speed testing
The line also came with IPv6. I asked the customer manager for the allocation, and he gave me a /64, but no gateway information. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t make it work properly—only a single address on the router was reachable.
In the end, I had to get technical staff from the municipal branch involved and we created a group chat. They then gave me another /64 PD allocation and a gateway, but I still couldn’t get it working.
Eventually they remote-assisted me. After half an afternoon and another half morning of troubleshooting, we finally got it working. Both the tech staff and I stepped into a lot of pitfalls along the way. My guess is that in this area, people ordering dedicated lines usually don’t care much about whether IPv6 is actually usable, so even their technical staff may not have much hands-on experience with it.
Once both IPv4 and IPv6 were working, I put a simple web service on the line and hosted a 10 GB file for testing. I downloaded it from servers in the following locations:
- A Unicom residential broadband line in the same area
- A Rainyun server in Ningbo
- A Rainyun server in Hubei
- A cloud phone in a China Mobile Jiangsu data center
The full-file average speed in every case was about 10.4 MB/s. That does not actually reach the contracted 90 Mbps. I’m planning to argue about that with the customer manager in a few months. I’ve already asked too many questions recently, and I don’t want him to get sick of me and stop replying.
Things people will probably care about
No special overseas optimization
There is no special routing optimization for international traffic. In that regard, it feels no different from normal residential broadband. For legal overseas sites, they said address-based optimization can be done, but I didn’t ask them to set that up because I already have my own way around access issues, so I have no idea how well their optimization would have worked.
Full-rate sustained usage may be reviewed
If you plan to saturate the line for long periods, they may review the business usage. If the business is considered compliant, then continuous full-rate usage is allowed. I’m not sure whether a WireGuard-based networking setup counts as compliant in their eyes.
PCDN is explicitly forbidden
The contract explicitly says PCDN is not allowed. In other words, you can’t use aggregation or similar methods for CDN-style content distribution.
There is an SLA, but it’s hard to trigger compensation
There is SLA coverage, but the conditions for compensation are pretty strict. Mobile only pays if the total duration of unannounced outages in a single month exceeds one full day. On the other hand, if there is a fault, they say they can send someone out even in the middle of the night.
Port 80/443 can be opened after filing, but don’t expect it to be simple
The IP can have ports 80 and 443 opened after filing the proper registration, but the process sounds complicated and uncertain. Even the customer manager had never handled it before. Also, a sole proprietorship may not necessarily qualify for filing. Since I only wanted the IP for remote networking between locations, I didn’t bother with it.
You can’t just change the IP
The IP address cannot be changed. If you really want a different one, you would have to cancel the service and open a new line.
No subletting or resale
The contract also clearly states that the IP cannot be sublet or resold.
The “free” equipment they gave me
I thought they were giving me a typical carrier-branded router. After opening the box, I realized it was actually enterprise FTTR gateway hardware that needs optical uplink. That makes it basically useless to me, and not something I can realistically repurpose or flash with custom firmware.
If I had known earlier, I would have just handed it back to the installers. Now I have to keep these two pieces of electronic junk around until I eventually terminate the service.
What happened to the old residential line
My old Mobile residential broadband had apparently been renewed for free over and over, probably because the local branch needed to meet internal retention targets. It felt wasteful to just let it go, so I arranged a line relocation instead.
That process was much faster than the dedicated line install. I called at 10 a.m., an installer showed up at 2 p.m., and by 3 p.m. the relocation was done. I paid an 80 RMB relocation fee and that was it.
Since there were no spare fiber wall ports left inside the house, the installer simply pulled in a new line from outside. This is a self-built rural house, so he just ran it through the air-conditioner opening. There were still plenty of spare PON ports available anyway.
While chatting with the installer, I learned that this kind of ultra-cheap or free broadband is often tied to a metric for reducing customer churn—basically, preventing people from abandoning Mobile broadband for another carrier. For the sake of those numbers, local business offices keep many accounts like this alive. He said a lot of accounts that show as offline in the system are basically cases like mine.
He also mentioned another odd detail: if a user reports faults twice within one month, the second one counts as a repeat fault report and the installer gets penalized. One fault report per month is normal and doesn’t affect them.
Because I had probably broken management connectivity on the old ONT by deleting tr069, it had been offline from their management platform for too long and could no longer be re-registered. So the installer replaced it with a new ONT.
After he left, I found that the new one also had a universal password, so I deleted tr069 again and switched it back to bridge mode.
That’s basically the whole story of getting this dedicated line installed. I wrote it down mostly as a straightforward record of what happened, because this kind of setup process is the sort of thing people often want details about.