Reminiscing about a passive income story based on PDCN (possibly involving NAS and others)

Saw a post about broadband being suspended and unusable>Original post

This reminded me of a case I encountered back when I was getting a mobile SIM card in my hometown's Tieba forum. This guy said his motivation for getting the card was to bundle it with broadband—the higher the upload speed, the better. He had several China Unicom enterprise plans, with a monthly fee of 599 RMB at half price, each coming with a gigabit broadband connection. In total, his monthly cost was over 5,000 RMB, but he made more than 30,000 RMB by reselling through Jingdong Cloud Wireless TreasureJingdong Cloud Wireless Treasure. He also mentioned that some guys in his city make over 100,000 RMB per month this way (these two had bought houses in suburban areas specifically to run them as server rooms).

Their advantage was that relatives used to work for China Unicom. Back then, one SIM card could be bundled with multiple broadband connections, and one person could get several cards. Now, one card can only be linked to 2–3 broadband connections, and the costs are higher than before, which significantly increased their operating costs. Additionally, operators are cracking down on PDCN, and many places randomly suspend broadband and blacklist users. For example, the NAS enthusiast in the original post got his broadband suspended under the suspicion of running upload-based PDCN.

With 30 Mbps upload speed, paired with the basic version of Jingdong Cloud Wireless Treasure, you can generally earn about 10 RMB per month. Early on, bundling broadband with a SIM card was free because many people didn't know about it, so broadband resources could be concentrated and bound to a single card. When 1000 Mbps broadband first came out, it was also given away for free, but now it's charged. On old application forms, the notes often listed upload speeds of 300 Mbps; now they're restricted to 50 Mbps. So this approach is gradually becoming a thing of the past. Previously, if you went offline to apply for a China Unicom Ice Cream plan (various versions), you could usually get 2–3 free broadband connections. Any plan above 99 RMB came with 1000 Mbps broadband, often at a 30% discount. In other words, with an investment of just 29 RMB per month, you could generate nearly 300 RMB in income. For enterprise plans costing 300 RMB/month, you could recover almost 3,000 RMB.

Of course, now upload speeds are restricted, PDCN is heavily monitored, and running high upload bandwidth can easily get your broadband suspended.>Jingdong Cloud Wireless Treasure

The above figures are personal estimates based on my own and others' broadband setups. I have 30 Mbps upload speed and use the lowest-tier Luban (64 GB storage), earning about 7 RMB per month. If I switch to bridge mode, I might get around 10 RMB. With Arthur, it could be close to 12 or 15 RMB. Most households don't do live streaming, so running Wireless Treasure mainly utilizes upload bandwidth. Ordinary users consume download bandwidth, so there's generally no impact. However, running it now at full upload capacity might get your broadband suspended (China Mobile's gigabit broadband last month still offered 300 Mbps upload; not sure if that's changed). Normally processed broadband upload speeds are limited to 50 Mbps, but you can usually apply for streamer broadband or enterprise broadband offline, which typically offers around 300 Mbps upload. These are usually only mentioned when you ask offline; otherwise, default residential plans come with throttled upload speeds.

If you're not worried about suspension, you can look into>Jingdong Wireless Treasure (if you just want a cheap router, check Xianyu—many people sell basic models after upgrading equipment or quitting the game).

If you decide to try it, remember to ask the installer to switch your connection to bridge mode; your returns will be more stable and potentially higher.