Websites can limit access to certain
content depending on where in the world you’re located, such as in the example
where someone is travelling abroad and can’t watch iPlayer or if you try to
access a US service from the UK. How can websites tell where you are in the
world? One very simple way that they could do this is to examine the IP
address. Every computer (well, actually your router to be strictly true), is
given an IP address by your ISP. Every computer on the internet must have a
unique address, because this ensures that data can be sent to the correct
destination. ISPs don’t just make up IP addresses; they are allocated blocks of
them and whole countries are allocated blocks of IP addresses too.
Go to nirsoft.net/countryip and you can
select a country and see the range of IP addresses that have been allocated to
it. Notice how the first of the four numbers making up the IP address changes
with each country. Go to whatismyipaddress.com and you can see your own IP
address and probably your ISP too. A website can simply use a look-up service
to see where in the world you’re located and then allow or deny access to its
content.
How
can websites tell where you are in the world?
There are many companies providing this
service and they run VPN servers. You run VPN client software on your computer,
which connects to the company’s server and that computer fetches the web pages,
email or whatever. It’s a sort of halfway house and everything between you and
the VPN company is encrypted so no one, not even your ISP, can eavesdrop on
your internet activities. Communications from the VPN company to the website is
just normal internet traffic, but eavesdroppers just see network traffic from
the VPN company and there’s no way to tell it belongs to you. If a website
tries to spy on you, for example, it can only detect the VPN company.
“You’ve paid for, it so you should be able
to watch it whether you’re at home or away”
Your computer does not directly communicate
with a website, mail server or whatever, and everything goes through a VPN
service provider, a bit like going from London to Glasgow on the train, but
changing at Manchester, both going and coming back. An interesting side effect of
the way VPNs work is that because a website communicates with the VPN company
and not you, if the website tries to determine anything about you, such as
where in the world you live, it will only be able to tell where the VPN
company’s computer is located.
Going back to the story of the person
working abroad wanting to catch up with Eastenders on BBC iPlayer, he can’t
access it directly because iPlayer will determine that he is abroad, and only
UK residents can watch iPlayer. After all, we pay a licence fee for the
privilege and foreigners don’t. If the person abroad connects to a VPN and the
VPN’s computer is located in the UK, iPlayer will determine the location as
being UK-based and will allow the person to watch the online television shows.
Eastenders
on BBC iPlayer
Is it legal? If you’re a UK resident and
pay the BBC licence fee, then what does it matter where you are when you watch
the television programme? You’ve paid for, it so you should be able to watch it
whether you’re at home or away. iPlayer does in fact let you watch programmes
abroad, but you would have to download and save them to the disk drive before
you left. Using a VPN just saves you the hassle.
Other regions of the world have similar
restrictions on online content, and you may be prevented from accessing certain
things in the US that are for US residents only. Netflix, Hulu and others
spring to mind, but there are also other products and services that you might
want to access. By using a VPN service provider that has computers in the US,
or wherever the content is that you want to access, you appear to be a local
resident. Your network traffic travels to the company’s computer secretly using
a VPN connection and then it goes the short distance from there to the website.
A VPN is therefore a very useful way to access services abroad.
VPN Providers
SecurityKISS offers five different VPN
plans. The cheapest is free and the most expensive costs $12.8 a month or $115
a year. There are three others in between at various prices. There are several
differences between the various plans, but the most obvious is the bandwidth
limit. The free plan offers just 300MB a day, which would be fine for general
web surfing, but it wouldn’t be any good for watching online video streaming.
The Ultimate plan offers unlimited bandwidth, though, and there are several
options between. As the plan price rises, so does the number of servers. When
we tried it, the free plan was offering one server in France, two in the UK and
two in the US. The Ultimate plan offers 11 countries with up to eight servers
in each country.
Internet
speeds are quit low with free VPNs, which is a fraction of the normal speed
