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Comment by pzmarzly | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, ThreeIE doesn't block them. And I'm fairly happy with them (>1Gbit/s on 5G still blows my mind), except for when I'm travelling to London and have to roam on 3 UK (I agree it sucks)

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Similar experience in my town. I got a strong 5-bar signal but their backhaul must be running on 56k modems.

Out of curiosity, do the UK content blocks apply to people roaming with a foreign sim? I'm also on three ie, just haven't been to the UK in ages.

Normally not, as historically traffic from roaming users has been "home routed". That is, it was sent over a tunnel (think IPsec or similar) back to the user's home network, where it left through their usual infrastructure.

Especially in late 4G and 5G, with ideas of low latency services (that would break if you did this), there are options to route traffic into the visiting network instead. Not sure if anyone's using this though.

Good question, I don't remember. I think it wasn't filtered? The only thing I remember for sure is that when I was recently in the Netherlands, the 3IE content blockers weren't in effect. So I think it's the same when visiting the UK, falling open by default.

(Yes, I don't want to send my passport photo to 3IE, that's why I'm dealing with these blockers. And I heard that even if you do verify yourself, they still mess with the DNS records.)

Generally no. Roaming data sessions are tunnelled back to the host provider.

I’ve seen this on IP lookups I’ve done when roaming - surely this is a bad idea for latency? What’s the motivation? Why would they cripple performance further by proxying to an endpoint that could be half away around the world.

This is especially infuriating as a European visiting the US, where a bunch of services are geo-fenced to American IPs. In several towns, I couldn't pay for parking or buy a bus ticket because the online service is geo-fenced and there's no brick-and-mortar alternative anymore. They also restrict apps in the play store or whatever to US accounts. I had to buy a cheap SIM card to get around all that. It's insane.

I feel that, geo-fencing is so annoying, got so tired of it.

I ended up just running Mullvad 24/7 on a server then running a proxy server that selectively proxies websites via Mullvad's proxies

It's absolutely horrible - I was in California a few months ago and all my traffic was being sent back to the UK - 300ms ping and about 1mbps each way.

I recall now it was a Twilio Global SIM - I was just using it as an early global sim rather than building on it - all traffic went back to T-Mobile in the US it seemed

I use their 5G as home broadband in Edinburgh. Their service is better than Vodafone’s where I am.

3 Home broadband is a good deal if you're close to a 5g mast as their 5g gear is quite new. If you're not close to a mast or its 4g only, you'll have the complete opposite experience.

From what I've read, alot of 3 Towers only have a single 1gbit virgin fibre link so you're at mercy to who else is using the same tower. If it's in a area with alot of traffic, you'll probably have pretty crap speeds.

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