I was surprised to see a decent load of traffic coming in from Redesign Malaysia, yesterday. I read several posts and am now quite interested in the fact heavy broadband users in Malaysia are going to make a big fuss over the throttling issue.

Anyway, I read several of the other blogs linked from the site, and found myself a very interesting solution.

Lucifer suggested that I use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access the net when I wrote about my attempts at maintaining a high downstream for my torrents. While I know what a VPN is, I didn’t really understand how it could actually help in masking my traffic.

I found havuk’s blog linked on Redesign, and he offered a most interesting solution. He suggested the use of SecureIX, a free VPN service. Here’s how it works:

As soon as you connect to our VPN server your computer is assigned a new IP address, an IP address that is owned by us, not your ISP. Then all of your Internet traffic is encrypted and is tunneled to our VPN server. Once there, it is decrypted and allowed to travel to its intended destination. Your local ISP will only see a single encrypted data stream between you and our VPN server. Your ISP can no longer monitor, log or control your Internet usage.

[...]

If you wish to use a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, but your ISP has blocked or throttled (slowed) the P2P traffic. Most ISP’s traffic shape P2P traffic to make it use less bandwidth causing slow downloads. If you use our VPN service your ISP will no longer be able to determine that you are using a P2P network and will not be able to block or throttle your usage.

Havuk’s idea was, basically, to remain anonymous and completely bypass all the monitoring by our beloved ISP. All you have to do is to sign-up and set up a VPN connection.

However, I share havuk’s sentiments on the matter: I’m not going to tell you how to set up a VPN, otherwise this service will get abused too easily. If you really want to try it, go and learn it yourself.

I tackled it last night, when my total downstream was approximately 5-10kB/s. Sure enough, in a matter of minutes, total downstream leapt up to the 50kB/s range. Just to see how long it can stay that way, I left it overnight.

I woke up the next morning to a disconnection.

Thinking that the VPN has failed me, I checked the speed/time graph in uTorrent. I should’ve taken a screenshot for evidence, but I forgot to :(

For over 9 hours straight [yes, it seems I slept for that long], the downstream has remained consistently at 40-55kB/s. Three of my torrents that were at 60-70% [after 3 weeks since downloading begin] were all completed in one night.

I reconnected to the VPN again, but I didn’t get so lucky this time. Still, I managed to get some 20-25kB/s average downstream, which I think is pretty damn good already, since it’s not exactly off-peak hours.

As long TMNet don’t start limiting the amount of data transfers per month [like what Maxis has done, dumbasses], I’m still cool with this.