International roaming plans from foreign carriers effectively bypass China's Great Firewall, making unfettered internet access seamless for visitors who use them.

21:31what I was using. But it ended up still being totally fine because the biggest thing that I think is a a major point of confusion is that you're not going to be able to access if you bring your international connection. you're not going to be able to access all the stuff back home because of the great firewall. And really in today's world, if you have a cell connection, that's not really an

21:53issue at all. It seems that the great firewall is basically, I think by design, just really not an issue for foreigners who come in with the cell connection. And I'm not an expert in exactly how all this technology works under the hood, but my understanding is that when you go in with an international roaming plan, you are connected, of course, to the local cell tower with your phone, but that

22:18your traffic requests actually route back to your home carrier first. Then they get processed out to whatever websites or services you're trying to use and then they get routed back from your home carrier to the Chinese local carrier and finally to your phone. And so you're bypassing all of these content filters just based on the fact that you're there with an international roaming plan. I wasn't 100% confident

22:45that was going to work, but increasingly I got more confident as I did more research. And my experience in the end was that worked totally smoothly. I decided to have two phone numbers for a couple different reasons. One was that I was trying to do this whole alter ego for the Chinese internet. And so I figured I should have a new email address. I created a new Gmail, which

23:07was my main Gmail with a travel on the end of it. I signed up for one month of Google Fi Wireless which comes with a good international roaming plan which was said to work in China and that came with a new phone number as well. And then I also at the last minute decided it's not such a big deal if they know my main American phone number that doesn't

23:29really give them any, you know, ability to put spyware on my device or anything. So, I also moved my main phone number over to the burner phone, which was just a pretty simple eSIM transfer. It's been a while since I've done that sort of thing, but it worked very smoothly. Even across Apple to Android, the process of transferring an eSIM from one to the other was really pretty easy. So, with

23:53that transfer, I had dual SIMs on the one phone, which meant I had two phone numbers. I could receive text messages. I could receive phone calls at both of them. I could make phone calls and send text messages out with both of those phone numbers and I had the two roaming plans from each of the carriers as well. The the one carrier I used was Google which I just got for this month and then

24:15I normally have T-Mobile and they also I signed up for the month-long international roaming plan for whatever extra charge that was. And between those two things, I have the two roaming plans. Both of which have this property of you connect to the local cellular internet, but your traffic is routed immediately out of the country through your home carrier to whatever services you're trying to access and then back