Operators facing the April 2026 enforcement wave described three survival paths: (1) price increases to pass on resource costs, (2) switching entirely to direct-connect, or (3) deploying proprietary protocols with dedicated clients — making standard Clash/Shadowrocket clients non-functional for those providers. The commercial forecast is for low-price high-quality plans to disappear and for month-by-month billing to become the default as users hedge against provider collapse.
From 2026-ermao-april-airport-outage — 2026年四月机场断线潮详解:通报、拔线与涨价预期下,普通用户该怎么应对 / Anatomy of the April 2026 China VPN-Reseller Outage Wave
· §5月以后机场可能怎么活下去
· 2026
· ermao.net (Chinese-language circumvention blog)
Implications
The shift by surviving providers toward proprietary protocol + dedicated client confirms that protocol-level obfuscation is becoming a baseline operational requirement for commercial CN circumvention infrastructure.
End-user circumvention tools should build in multi-provider redundancy natively, as the commercial reseller ecosystem is contracting and individual providers are increasingly fragile.