December 3

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VPN and connecting to the UK internet from other countries

By NickLitten

December 3, 2010

VPN

Virtual Private Networking is a technique that allows you to connect to the Internet from one country but *look* like you are connected from another country.

I use this a lot when traveling – I get persistently annoyed by some provincial on line services (the BBC TV website is a prime example) that only let you view content if you are physically IN a specific country.

I’m English. I pay the English BBC TV License… I watch a lot of on line programmes when traveling in the UK using my laptop from various hotel rooms. I can stream content live or download it for later viewing. It’s simple and another great function of this thing called the interweb-super-net-highway – what do we call the Internet, world wide web, web, cloud thing anyway?

But wait, I digress, the problem comes when I am outside of the UK – particularly to the USA where I travel frequently and for long periods of time. So, if I come to the US for a few weeks I cant access my favorite online TV programs or even (shock) access my favorite online poker websites because their clever servers realize that I am connecting from an American IP and give me a nice message saying that I cant access them because I am clearly not British. *sigh*

But wait – help is at hand

I found the solution to all my problems. It’s called VPN.

What is VPN?

It standard for Virtual Private Network and basically allows you to connect to another computer on the Internet (this technique is called tunneling) and then use that computers Internet connection to re-connect to the web. Make sense? So from American I can connect to the VPN, effectively connecting to a UK computer and re-connecting through it, so that any subsequent servers I log on to think I’m the UK computer. neat eh.

After hunting around and trying a few different free VPN – trust me its not worth the effort – I came across IPVANISH VPN. A really simple server that only costs a few dollars per month and allows me utter anonymity on my traveling Internet connections from wherever I am on the globe.

 

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