VPN Services

[cambrose]

Since I have been living on campus, the content available to me has been filtered greatly, and I'm getting sick of it. I was wondering if anyone has used any VPN services that they were happy with and would recommend for my use. I need it primarily for torrenting as well as accessing some content that is currently blocked by my university. Before anyone asks, this is all for completely legal and above-the-board purposes.

[DJ_Evergreen]

If it's all legal and above-the-board, why is your school blocking it in the first place?

[Thrax]

Because most universities packet shape the BitTorrent protocol right out of existence.

Cam: You could try ThePirateBay's new VPN service. It's like $7 a month (also legal).

[cambrose]

Thanks Thrax, I have a friend that is supposed to be providing me a VPN to use, but if it falls through, I'll try it.

DJ: In response to you, any use of p2p (even for legit purposes like non-copyrighted music, linux distros, etc.) is banned...

[airbornflght]

Wow. That makes my university look completely open.

The do QoS obviously, and filter only 4 ports. Other than that, they do no packet shaping or tiered system. bandwidth is shaped by the user, not protocol.

[the_technocrat]

Keep in mind most Universities (and libraries) get their ISP bill paid for by the government (the Universal Service Fund)

As someone who has had to do the paperwork every year (it's a pain) I can tell you they're required to block certain services or lose their funding. Some Universities do this better/more intelligently than others.

[cambrose]

Well...while I do understand this, I am paying $60/month for my own access (120/month total for my 2br apt), and I want to be able to access the full internet. As of right now, I am having to have people FTP new revisions of win7 and anything else I want to access so I can access it...which is getting old. So while the university has to do what they do, so do I.

[GrayFox]

Heh, Makes my school seem much nicer by comparison.

Only AAA they do is on the wifi (PEAP + WPA2 TKIP) too so they can't track you reliably unless your on the wifi.

300meg feed for oncampus, 100meg for residence, and another 100meg for one of the class rooms im in. (Ive peaked at over 60megabits a second when using the un-throttled ip range).

They use layer 7 qos as well to prevent the links from being saturated all the time.


All through cogent for transit too so bandwidth is cheep.

However, if you go over 1TB in a month they traffic shape you to a megabit. (But all you have to do is change your hostname & mac address to bypass it).