Last month we asked for your support to help us test our upcoming VPN based dialer in the Middle East. Thanks to our helpful users who chipped in, we discovered something that left us quite surprised.
For example, when a user in Oman was logging in using the experimental dialer, we noticed that the ISP was detecting the VPN tunnel being established and was blocking the connection. Apart from the first packet, nothing else was reaching the Spokn server. Clearly, the ISP in question was performing deep packet inspection before allowing packets through to the Internet! We believe the same is happening in certain other Middle Eastern countries as well and this has forced us to rethink our implementation.
We’ve quickly come up with a new solution which relies on obfuscation of the data that the dialer is sending. Since the data is obfuscated, the ISPs will not be able to detect a standard protocol ‘signature’ in the packets being generated by the dialer. This will also allow us to increase the voice quality by using higher-quality codec bit-rates as will hopefully not be restricted by speed throttling tactics implemented by ISPs.
Yet again, if you are in the Middle East, we need your help to validate our assumptions and to verify that our new implementation works well for you. So please write in to us at support@spokn.com if you can help us make Spokn better for you and others like you.