TRANSCRIPTION
Hey there, Pete Moriarty here and if I've been a little bit quiet over the last couple of weeks, it's probably because I've been in China, which has been really cool. I've been traveling around, but I wanted to answer a question for you, which, how can I use Google Services in China. I'm going to find a quiet spot and answer that one for you.
Okay, so I found a quiet spot and I'm going to explain. How can you work with Google apps in the Google ecosystem when visiting China? We get this question a lot from different customers and from prospects, specifically business owners that do business in China or maybe just need to visit China either for business or for a personal visit.
The challenge is, if you don't already know, that most Google Services are actually blocked in China. There's been a bit of dispute between the government and Google. Google trying to do business in China, but the government wanting them to restrict certain websites in their search, and Google eventually kind of said, “Nope, we're going to pull out.” So, the Chinese government decided to block most of Google Services carte blanche, which means that you can't access them. You can't access Gmail, can't access drive. There's other services as well which you can't access like Facebook too.
What do you do to get access to these? Well, to get internet access when you land in China, most hotels are going to have wifi, but if you're out and about on the road, you're probably going to want to get yourself a local SIM card. But that in itself presents a problem, because if you're not actually a Chinese citizen, well, you can't actually go ahead and pick up a SIM card just off the street. You need to actually have an ID card and only citizens are able to get those.
If you're traveling with a Chinese national, then you're fine. However, if you need to just pick up a SIM card, there are some services that will sell you a prepaid SIM card online and have it delivered and shipped to your hotel. I haven't tried any of those, but there are some options out there and I'll link one of those below.
But, once you've got internet access, how do you actually access Google Services? Well, you need to use something called a VPN, which stands for virtual private network and what that allows you to do is, it's kind of like a tunnel. Just think about a sci-fi movie that you remember, where there's a portal between different universes. Well, when you're here in China, no matter what internet connection you're using, you can actually portal right back to another country, Australia or Japan or somewhere else, or the United States and portal your internet connection, portal your device whether it's your phone, whether it's your computer to that other country and then use that country's internet connection to access the services in a place that they're not blocked.
So, you use this service, a VPN service on your device to connect to your Google Services. The reliability may not be as fantastic as just using a local internet connection. The speed might not be as fantastic. But you can still access all the services. You can use Gmail, you can use Hangouts, you can use Drive. Even on a mobile, I've tested them on a mobile, not the most reliable service, but it does get the job done. I've been able to do a video Hangouts, and I've even been able to use Dialpad which is our phone system which relies on a lot of Google technology in the background, and therefore it needs a VPN to access it as well.
I've got a recommendation on what VPN you can use. It's called Express VPN and at the time of testing it was about 12 US dollars for a month of access and you can use it on up to three devices at the same time, which is pretty useful. So, you just go to ExpressVPN.com, sign up, put in your credit card, little app that you download to your computer and your download it to your phone as well. Get it all set up and installed. I'd probably recommend you test it before you leave your home country because it can be difficult to set up bits and pieces when you're here in China.
One thing to note, if you're using a Chromebook or a Chrome device, you definitely, definitely want to make sure that it's one of the newer Chrome devices that supports Android apps. The reason for that is, to use Express VPN, you're going to need to download the Express VPN app, but if you make it all the way to China and you haven't yet set up that VPN app, well you're not even able to access the Google Playstore to download the app to then set up the VPN. So you're in this catch-22 where you can't set up the VPN, you can't download the app and you're kind of stuck, which is what happened to me. So, if you've got a Mac or a PC, you're fine, but if you're using a Chromebook, make sure you get the VPN setup before you land in China.
There you go, that's how you access all of your Google Services and you can get work done while you're traveling abroad. I hope you have a great one and I'll see you in the next video.
