Your own line is the thing standing in the way

Everything is slow or nothing connects, and it has been like that consistently rather than in patches. Meanwhile somebody else on a different connection reports no trouble at all.

Some networks interfere with Tor. A workplace, a campus, a hotel, a mobile operator, an entire country. The interference ranges from mild throttling to outright refusal, and the client does not always tell you which one it has hit.

What interference looks like

Nothing ever connects

Consistent failure from a specific network points at blocking rather than at conditions.

Connects, then dies quickly

A pattern of dropped connections after a short time suggests something is interrupting deliberately.

Very slow but functional

Throttling. Traffic identified and given the worst available treatment.

Works elsewhere, never here

The clearest signal of all, and it needs a second network to notice.

Why the market gets accused

Because people carry a mental model from the ordinary web, where a site can and does refuse visitors by region. An onion service has no equivalent capability worth speaking of. It does not learn where you are, it does not see an address that reveals a country, and the whole design is built so that it cannot.

So a claim that a market is blocked in a country is almost always a description of a connection problem written from the wrong end.

The fix

Bridges. These are entry points that are not published in the main list, which makes them harder to identify and block. Tor Browser can request them from within its own settings, and there are alternative routes for obtaining them if that request is itself blocked.

There are also transports designed to make the traffic look like something else entirely, which help where the blocking is doing pattern recognition rather than simple list matching. Which one works depends entirely on what is doing the blocking, and finding out means trying.

What follows from getting it right

You solve a solvable problem instead of waiting out an imaginary one. This is one of the few pages here where the correct attribution leads to a concrete configuration change that reliably works.

It also stops a false belief spreading. Somebody who concludes their country is blocked will tell other people, and that story is durable, unfalsifiable and completely wrong.

Where you are matters more than what you are reaching

One practical consequence is worth stating. If the same machine works on one network and fails on another, you have learned something about those networks and nothing about your destination. That sounds obvious written down and it is routinely missed, because people change networks without noticing they changed anything.

A phone moving between mobile data and a home connection is changing networks. A laptop that connected to a guest network is on a different one. Any of those transitions can turn a working setup into a broken one without a single setting being touched.

Before you conclude anything at all, know which network you were on, and whether it is the same one as last time.

• Back to the cases the network caused
• When it was general rather than local
• Terms used on this site