I want to second this (so you know it's more than one person) I'm currently in China, although servers I'm working on are in the US. For whatever reason, although I can get to the server either way, the proxy route is about 4-5 times faster and about twice as reliable. It's a private proxy server, and must have user name and password.
Currently, I'm having problems getting Blogg-X 2.13 to connect completely, and I suspect it's because of timeouts / slow connections.