just got back from a 3 month gig outta Shenzhen did a bunch of speed and connection tests on different services cause the marketing claims are just nuts. here's what i actually saw tested 4 big providers over a month. success rate for the first connection was all over the place. provider a had like 92% success using their obfuscated servers but speeds dropped to like 30% of my normal on a good day. provider b was more like 70% success but faster when it did connect, maybe 50% of normal. you gotta have multiple configs ready - i had wireguard, openvpn tcp on 443, and their stealth protocol all set up. if you go, don't just rely on one app. grab the config files, set up manual connections. the app might not even download once you get there. also, residential ip proxies are worth checking out for some cases but they cost more. for just access, my setup was a travel router with 3 different vpn profiles loaded. swapped them every day. annoying but it worked. total monthly cost for two solid services was like 25 bucks.