Users in Shenzhen/Dongguan China?

S1mon

Are there any users on these forums who are based in Southern China? Or users who were traveling there regularly?

I'm trying to understand how well Onshape performs from the servers there. In my experience internet connectivity at factories and hotels in the region can be very good or very bad.

Also, how good is the localization into Chinese? I assume it covers the basic text in the application, but what about help etc?

john_rousseau

Onshape performance from mainland China can be a challenge. Bandwidth and latency through The Great Firewall is inconsistent and can be just bad. Onshape's nearest data centers are in Tokyo and Singapore. By default, we send all traffic from mainland China to the Singapore data center. That tends to be a more reliable network path. Using a VPN to Tokyo or the US West Coast often helps but can also be unreliable at times of high traffic congestion.

Customers with the best success have purchased a dedicated line from China Telecom or China Unicom to Tokyo or Singapore. With this they get consistently great Onshape performance.

I'll let others provide feedback on the localization.

S1mon

@john_rousseau

Aren’t there AWS servers in China? How are we supposed to develop consumer products if we can’t use Onshape easily in China?

john_rousseau

The regulatory environment in China is not conducive to Onshape's ability to protect your data. AWS doesn't even control the "AWS" servers in China.

S1mon

Much of my career has been working with vendors in China. I recently spent 8.5 years at an international company with its largest office in Shenzhen. I set up Solidworks PDM Pro (née EPDM) in order to keep our US and SHZ engineers in sync. It was a royal pain in the ass, and to get good performance on both ends we were going to have to pay $50k just for SQL licenses. Our SHZ office was also spending $$$$ per month for its internet connection, which was a fraction of the performance of what you can get in the US.

Now I'm at a new company with a much smaller group of MEs, but we still need to keep things in sync within the team (on both sides of the Pacific) and share files with vendors in Asia. 

I get that some industries may want the illusion of safety by keeping their servers out of China, but if you're doing business there, your files will be on that side of the great firewall eventually anyway. Why make things difficult with VPN to Singapore or Tokyo? Can't we just have the option at least of allowing things to be replicated to AWS servers inside China?

To me this could become the point at which I have to give up on Onshape.

PTC owns Arena now. How are they able to have good performance and ensure data privacy in China? Can't Onshape do something similar?

wout_theelen541

I'm interested in knowing about this too. I'm just in the prototyping stage and am using pretty standard off the shelf components, I'm buying things in China at least for now as sourcing is a lot easier there and buying these parts in Europe directly is absurd. I would like the ability to collaborate though and avoid the hassle of creating drawings and exporting PDFs even if this would be somewhat limited.

S1mon

We have one engineer in southern China. It’s been easier for him to use Onshape than it was to use a floating license with Creo. For whatever reasons, the connection to the floating license server was more flakey. I don’t know all the details but it seems like sometimes he uses VPN for Onshape and sometimes he doesn’t. 

In my experience going there (all pre-Covid), internet connectivity has been getting better over the years, but certain hotels or factories can have better or worse bandwidth.

You will most likely need drawings depending on the type of parts and assemblies you are manufacturing. I’ve certainly launched tools with just 3d files many times, but by the time they are ready for T0, they are going to want drawings, and ultimately so are you, otherwise you won’t have control over quality.