UAE & VOIP: What, Why and How

This is not news to most of the people. It has been blocked for several years now. (From 2005 I guess) In fact not only in UAE, it has been blocked in several countries such as China, Oman, Syria, Turkey and Malaysia (Surprisingly). In this post I'll stick to UAE and discuss the reasons behind it , how they have done it and what can we do to override it.

What is VOIP?

First of all in case you're a newbie to all the tech stuff we'll look at what is VOIP. VOIP aka voice over internet protocol is a way and a technology where we can send voice and other multimedia over internet protocol (IP), such as Internet. In simpler terms using same phone service that you currently use over the Internet. 

How?

To transport voice over the Internet, first we have to convert it from analog to digital. For that either we have to use a device such as an ATA (Analog Terminal Adapter) or else a VOIP phone. ATA is a device which connects analog telephone to a VOIP network, so usually it contains a Ethernet jack as well as a RJ-11 phone jack. Normally the implementation will look like below,

Ordinary phone => ATA => Router => Internet => VOIP Service Provider

On the other hand if you're using an VOIP phone the implementation of it will look like this,

VOIP phone => Internet => VOIP SP

But luckily for us there are applications which uses VOIP such as Whatsapp and Viber which'll do the hard part for us

Why UAE has blocked it?

Back to the original story, At the moment there are two leading mobile network providers in UAE, Du and Etisalat , where both of them wanted to implement VOIP. But then they realized if they have implemented it they are gonna lose large amount of money from the people making international calls to family and friends. So to avoid that they have enabled it only for business.

In fact in February 2015 Du CEO Osman Sultan has said that the telecom operators restricted the usage of VOIP services to protect their investments in network,

"The use of VoIP creates an economical issue. Skype is not blocked. Of course we know people use it,” he was quoted speaking to 7Days newspaper. “For certain usage of Skype [PC-to-PC], it is allowed. But making phone calls through Skype directly, in principal, is not allowed"

How?

For this I'm gonna be super simple and less techy so that anyone can understand the concept behind this. Normally when you communicate between devices it tends to the encrypt the information in between so that only those two can understand the content of it. (Eg; When you call someone from Skype, the data packets, in this case whatever you send to the other party goes encrypted, so that outsiders cannot grab that info in between.) And this is called payload encryption. (Simply if the payload encryption is enabled outsiders cannot get what's the communication content is). However in most of the cases even though outsiders doesn't know the content they know what's the protocol you are using and then from that they can get your destination IP address and block whatever you're sending... (If in case this is all gibberish to you leave it in the comments so that I'll try to give a better explanation)

How to use VOIP in UAE?

And yes, you guessed that right, by using a VPN app you can easily bypass this madness. So let's see how that works,

VPN aka Virtual Private Network is a mechanism of adding an extra level of privacy to your online activity by encrypting your internet connection and makes you an invisible entity to the outside world. Before explain how, first I'll give a brief intro on how you connects to the internet. Normally, when you try to connect to the internet first you have to go through the ISP. (Internet Service Provider, in your case whatever the network/connection that you're using). So simply all the internet traffic is going through the ISP servers so if needed they can see what you're doing. So when you connect via a VPN before connecting to your ISP it connects to one of the VPN servers and then it encrypts the connection making it only readable to the VPN server and then pass it to the ISP, so instead of your IP address ISP get's one of the VPN server's IP address making it hard to trace it back to you. 

So how does VPN solves the issue? By connecting to VPN, our TCP packets get wrapped from VPN protocol, so anyone who's analyzing the packets cannot get details such as destination IP and the port, making it hard for them to block it. So in UAE's point of view only thing they can do is blocking VPN protocol, which is highly unlikely to happen.

However VPN does comes with a price, since all those encrypting and decrypting needs processing power, normally stronger the encryption used, the slower the internet access. Furthermore normally VPN servers located somewhat far from your original destination so longer the journey, again slower the internet access. So to reduce that it is always a good practice to choose a VPN server which is nearby to your country. Keep in mind that creating a VPN server is quite costly, so the providers will charge some amount for the service, and yes I know there are some free stuffs out there but there's huge possibility that they might sell your info to others in return.

Last but not least, I recently found out that if you get caught using a VPN in the UAE, you will face fines of up to $545,000 or even worse they might kick you out of the country.

So, be careful... :)

References

I found really useful content in following places as well. Go check them out... 

1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/if-you-get-caught-using-vpn-uae-you-will-face-fines-545000-1572888
2. http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/What+is+VOIP
3. http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/ATA
4. http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Phones
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_IP
6. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-VOIP-blocked-in-Dubai-and-in-other-places-in-UAE
7. http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/57716/how-do-countries-block-encrypted-protocols-like-skype
8. https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/38176/vpns-beginners-need-know/