Is Your Anonymous VPN Not Working?

For many people around the world, a VPN is one of their most essential online tools.   These Virtual Private Networks allows users to surf securely and have unrestricted access to the internet.   The VPN was primarily designed to add a layer of security to web transactions, however nowadays it’s arguably more often used as a way to hide your location.

Hiding your IP Address

For example, if you try and access the BBCs online service from outside the UK, you’ll get blocked as it’s not accessible outside the country.  Same goes for Hulu, US Netflix, ABC NBC and RTE in Ireland – in fact just about every major media site on the web is only accessible from specific countries.  When you combine the other internet restrictions often applied by specific countries, huge areas of the web are often not accessible depending on your location.

So, what does the expat Brit, or travelling US businessman do when they can’t access all their local shows and media? What if they want to watch the BBC News to keep up to date.  Well, they use a VPN service to hide their location and let them watch whatever they want, irrespective of where they happen to be.  You’ll see holidaymakers in Spanish bars watching Eastenders on their laptops whilst an Irishman streams Gaelic football on RTE online next to him.

Basically, a VPN bypasses all these blocks and allows you to watch whatever you want.  Services like Identity Cloaker have adapted to locate servers in all of the most populous countries.  I have personally been a subscriber for well over ten years now and use it pretty much every day when travelling.

My VPN Doesn’t Work

Over the last year however things have been getting a little difficult, as the media companies have started to fight back. For a variety of reasons ranging, they’ve started to try and block the use of VPNs when accessing their services. There have always been some attempts to block the use of these methods, however they have never been that serious. It’s actually very difficult to detect a properly configured VPN so the companies would have to individually block IP addresses. Although this works it’s only temporary (VPN services simply switch their addresses) and it’s extremely time consuming. Nevertheless, the BBC attempted this purge early in 2016 and succeeded in blocking many thousands of VPNs from being used to access BBC iPlayer from outside the UK.

Other companies like RTE, Hulu, ABC and many others have followed suit painstakingly identifying addresses with multiple connections and individually blocking proxy and VPN connections from accessing their sites. Many of the smaller VPN companies have closed down, although most of the established companies have the sort of infrastructure which allows them to keep switching these addresses round so are still active.

Only Allow Residential IP Addresses

Unfortunately, 2016 saw a new development which has been extended over the last few years. Netflix have been under pressure from the media firms that they license their media from to block access to these programs. The primary reason is that Netflix pays for distribution rights per country, so they only have the rights to broadcast content in those specific countries, yet a working VPN completely bypasses this.   The media giant however decided to use a different approach to blocking the virtual networks by blocking every IP address which was classified as commercial.

Suddenly the cry my VPN doesn’t work went up across the world as literally 99% of these services stopped working with Netflix overnight.   The problem was that all these VPNs are installed in commercial datacentres and as such Netflix was able to block every single one of them in one go.  There were casualties of course, people could no longer access their accounts from company offices for example, but it appears this was a price worth paying.

It’s likely many more of the big media companies will follow this method, although it won’t be suitable for all of them.  Amazon Prime has already followed suit so that you may have problems accessing video streams if you use a VPN with a commercial classification.  A couple of the more advanced VPN systems like Identity Cloaker have upgraded their networks to include residential IP addresses, however this is very difficult to do so it’s unlikely that most providers will be able to do this.

Update in 2023 – Some Hope for VPNs

This post is quite a few years old and deserves a small update.  My biggest fear from 2016 as far as VPNs go was that businesses and organisations would continue to focus on the type of IP addresses they were using.   Residential IP addresses are actually much harder to obtain and obviously cost a lot more than standard datacentre ones.

Since then we’ve had some positive developments –

Netflix Scrapped Residential IP Requirement

It only lasted about a year and looked to have been extremely effective but they stopped blocking non-residential addresses.  I’m not entirely sure why but it’s probably due to the number of other users that were blocked – probably from work and corporate networks.  It’s likely the distinction wasn’t as clear cut – that all datacentre IPs were proxies!

Residential IPs Become More Accessible

A few years ago it was extremely difficult to get access to residential IP addresses.  In fact it was almost impossible, a few proxy providers like Storm managed to build a network but it was extremely time consuming and expensive.   They basically had to lease individual home connections and resell them!

That’s all changed now and various techniques and arrangements seem to have made the supply much more accessible.  There’s plenty of VPN providers who will let you have a VPN connection with a residential IP address – they don’t even cost that much anymore – providers like IPBurger will let you have one with a very low monthly cost.

Residential IP VPN

These are called (rather logically) residential IP VPN services.  They’re exactly the same as normal VPNs but just use an IP address from a residential range.  There are two main advantages to this which makes them more anonymous and secure –

• Residential IPs are harder to block – many sites block addresses from datacentre IPs figuring that the majority are proxies and bots.  You can’t do this with residential ranges as the majority are real home users trying to access your site.
• Residential VPNs aren’t flagged as VPN services which means that you don’t stand out in logs or firewalls.  They’re essential if you don’t want anyone to know you’re using a VPN.

 

Further Reading – Buy UK proxy ip address