@jor123 wrote:
@Korth wrote:
Be aware that the Telus network has embedded (OpenWave) Video Optimization.
That last part is interesting - does VPN prevent that?
Do you have something to hide?
VPNs cannot circumvent machinery embedded at this level of the network. Stuff which identifies streams - deconstructs, manipulates, reconstructs them - at the packet level.
OpenWave is embedded into the network machinery. It's part of a whole suite of OpenWave media components which are specifically designed to track and mine data as much as they are specifically designed to optimize and increase dataflow. The purpose is to minimize cost of data stream to the provider (and incidentally to the subscriber). The purpose is also to maximize revenue to the provider (through the subscriber) with nuggets mined from that data stream. Google it up and take notice of what OpenWave says on their own sites when they're advertising (selling) their own products to their own customers (ISPs like Telus).
The entire concept of a VPN is basically pointless when it's being run on a mobile device ... which constantly reports its location and identity to the network while the network constantly tracks it's location and identity ... that's how cellular communications works ... anonymity is impossible while the device is active. Monitoring (and capturing data from) the endpoints of a VPN tunnel across a cellular network is trivially easy for the cellular provider, especially when they are also the internet provider. You might be able to fool websites into believing you're from a different region, you won't be able to fool the network while it has full oversight of every packet it passes to the VPN server or fetches from the VPN server. (Any VPN product which claims otherwise is lying in their advertising.)
You can always encode, encrypt, compress, or package your video files in weird nonstandard formats the network won't recognize as video streams. But then it's no longer a video stream with realtime delivery and playback, it's just a file transfer you have to unpack and watch later. And it's not an option when the way the video is delivered to your device is invariably from a streaming source - if it's streamed across the network then it's "optimized" (and datamined) before it reaches you, with or without VPNs and firewalls.
