I use VyprVPN which has gateways in a lot of countries.
the Brit expat community was on onspeed.com so they could watch BBC Iplayer
That is one of the reasons to use a VPN. Vypr works well with Iplayer and Amazon Prime or what ever streaming service you use.
LTE is the first useable mobile internet technology in the history of mankind.
3G was nice until all devices were capable. It is all about the cell load.
In some areas (Airports) LTE is very impaired, by the number of users.
3G was nice until all devices were capable. It is all about the cell load.
Not really. 3G has a very high latency which prevents applications requiring real time communications from working. Skype is one example, that simply doesn’t work over 3G.
Of course the cell bandwidth is limited with LTE just like with every other technology and it remains to be seen how that will evolve. I remember the first time I tried LTE several years ago at Atlanta airport with one of the first devices available. It was an epiphany.
Latency on 3G is often bad enough that an interactive connection (such as SSH) works better over dialup than it does over 3G. Sometimes I can type 30 or 40 characters before they get echoed back.
Deviating from the main topic, you do not need a VPN to watch iPlayer abroad.
I watch it using Unblock us DNS service http://www.unblock-us.com which tricks the server into thinking the request is coming from the UK.
It works great for the US version of Netflix as well for 4 euros a month.
Well, nearly four years on, I am sitting in a hotel in Greece and… they block seemingly everything except port 80 and 443 and a few others. So, no SMTP sending of emails, no FTP, etc.
The VPN which David set up for me makes everything work 
I have found another use for it: apparently some online banking websites block access from abroad. I am with one of the “big four” UK ones and they admitted they do this, but if you complain loudly they can disable it. I asked the d1ckheads what is the point of online banking if people can’t use it while on holiday? The VPN, terminating in the UK, solves this nicely…
@kwispel that site is fairly pricey, at some $5/month. But I suppose they need lots of bandwidth because much of the clientele will be using it for videos
I don’t know if I am teaching people to suck eggs, but my experience if you run two VPNs (I run ExpressVPN and either Hotspot Shield or Hola, depending on the device), it defeats much more than one.
I have no idea of the mechanism, but in many circumstances “it just works”.
@Peter check this out: https://code.kryo.se/iodine/
It is an IP over DNS solution. It is quite slow as it uses TXT DNS requests to route IP data but it works almost everywhere. It even bypasses gateways at those commercial Wi-Fi’s that you need to pay for, provided their DNS server actually forwards TXT requests to the assigned domain name DNS server that you have set up. Those gateways usually alter A-requests to forward you to their paying portal but let TXT requests be as they are.
Dimme wrote:
it uses TXT DNS requests to route IP data
Wow…
I read about this years ago but thought it stopped working.
You have to install the server part on your server.
Very cunning!
One curious thing I found out about VPNs:
Under Windoze, if you open a VPN and then open a second VPN, the second VPN runs through the first one.
Under Android, the opening of the second VPN closes the first VPN. It is possible that if the first VPN was implemented by a 3rd party VPN app, that may not happen.
The Windows behaviour can sometimes be useful, though the circumstances tend to be a bit weird. For example you may be in a hotel whose wifi blocks everything except Port 80, 443 and a couple of others (not uncommon). Then you need a Port 443 VPN – like the SoftEther one mentioned earlier. And then if you have a machine somewhere which is accessible only over PPTP, you need to run a second (PPTP) VPN to reach that. PPTP is an increasing problem nowadays due to the nonstandard protocol, anyway.
Note that my comments about VPNs in this thread concern VPNs terminating on a machine owned by you, not the sort of commercial VPN services people use for anonymous browsing of dodgy stuff which terminate in places like the Peoples’ Republic of Upper Volta
