If you spend any amount of time online, then investing in a VPN program is a very worthwhile investment for a variety of reasons. The most obvious are the blocks which operate based on your location, the reason you can’t watch BBC abroad for instance. Secondly security, the internet is inherently insecure partly because it’s built up on a huge interconnected network of other people’s hardware. When you visit a web site your connection travels through routers, switches and hubs owned and controlled by all sorts of people and organisations of which you’ll have little knowledge and no control.
Just to illustrate, simply start a command prompt in windows (run – command.com) and type in tracert www.facebook.com, this will show you the route your internet request will make when you use Facebook.
All those steps are other people’s hardware and everything you do online follows a similar pattern hopping from one piece of hardware to another until it reaches it destination. Of course, this would be perfectly fine and is the way the internet has always worked, except the majority of this communication is not protected at all all, in fact it’s often in clear text. Which means anyone can read, divert or copy information from all your internet transactions.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) protects against this by encrypting all the data in your connection, every username, every password and email protected against anybody who is listening in on your data.
How a VPN Can Help You Watch BBC Abroad
But there’s another cool use which you can see in this video – How to access BBC iPlayer Outside UK on YouTube. The privacy aspect of a VPN has another excellent use, which is arguably the reason millions of people use them across the world. This simple network connection allows expats to watch british TV, to access Hulu from Europe and watch Sky Go abroad.
The reason is that not only is your connection encrypted but your identity/location is protected too. This means that you pretend to be in a different location, which is useful when you are trying to access media sites which restrict access to a specific country. In the above example the VPN server is located in the UK so it allows people all over the world to watch BBC abroad and access the iPlayer application at will.
This is because when you visit any web site your real location and IP address is hidden when using a VPN. The website will see the server’s address and if you use a British one then you can watch ITV player abroad or any UK TV stations. Normally they would get blocked when they tried to access the site because their IP address wasn’t registered to a UK address.
The VPN can also be used on most internet enabled devices which all have an IP address when connected. So if you want to learn how to watch bbc iplayer abroad on iPad or other tablet then a VPN can be established from there too. The key to getting the most of a VPN service is flexibility, the best services have an infrastructure with servers all over the world and with hundreds of addresses. This is important for two reasons, firstly it stops them being detected, both BBC and SKY Go blocking VPN programs in 2017 which affected the smaller companies. In addition having servers in different countries means that you can access media sites all over the world, in addition to allowing you to watch BBC abroad you can also watch US, Canadian and Australian media sites just for a start!
Of course it’s not just simple web based geo-blocks that a VPN helps sidestep, many countries block access to parts of the web too. China is probably the most famous example where the State heavily censors the internet using the infamous ‘Great Firewall of China’ and many popular social media sites are blocked by default. The Chinese people however have discovered that you can bypass these blocks simply by subscribing to a VPN service based in another country – they also use it to watch UK TV abroad free of censorship.
There is no doubt that the use of ‘personal vpn’ programs are growing at an exponential rate. However this is hardly surprising, the privacy issues are very real with complete records of our online activity available to anyone in authority effectively. The extending use of region locking is also likely to drive demand too, with so much digital content online and restrictions being added depending on your location.
People don’t like being blocked from content simply due to their location and a VPN completely bypassed these restrictions. Some of them are extremely unfair, for example a person could pay the BBC license fee and be blocked from being able to watch BBC abroad on their holidays! After all why shouldn’t they be allowed to watch uk TV abroad on iPad while they are on holiday?