ANSWERED Is a South Korea VPN server possible?

[mehāniskākaravīrs935 24]

Is it possible for AirVPN to purchase a server in South Korea?, i have read that their average internet speeds are even faster than Europe. Is there unsuitable laws for them to operate there? I personally do not live in China or Australia, but i do wonder if a VPN endpoint there could provide more bandwidth that is faster.

 

http://tinyurl.com/ptc6s5y

[zhang888 1065]

There was once, but it is a highly problematic location, with monopoly from SK Telecom and large scale internet censorship laws that

seem to apply even to business ISPs and overseas customers.

[foxmulder 43]

Yes, there has been a South Korean server not long ago, it was called "Dsiban"

 

You can read more in the corresponding thread:

 

https://airvpn.org/topic/14762-new-200-mbits-server-available-kr/?hl=%2Bsouth+%2Bkorea

 

Regards

 

Fox

[FromtheWalls 83]

Is it possible for AirVPN to purchase a server in South Korea?, i have read that their average internet speeds are even faster than Europe. Is there unsuitable laws for them to operate there? I personally do not live in China or Australia, but i do wonder if a VPN endpoint there could provide more bandwidth that is faster.

 

http://tinyurl.com/ptc6s5y

It's not long since Air launched a server in South Korea, but had to close it down almost immediately because the datacenter did not comply with the net neutrality rules Air requires. The community supported the shutdown because of its failure to respect net neutrality, and thanks to South Korea's extreme censorship rules their high-speed internet is nothing to envy them. Doubt Air will try a server there again until South Korea changes its internet policies. I see someone posted a link to it above while typing my reply 

[willowbrook 16]

I live in South Korea and wanted a Japanese server for a long time. Just because SK has fast average speed does not mean when you connect you will get reliable speed. If you live in SK, yes SK VPN node is probably the best. The thing with SK is that reliability/speed for a connection to a certain data center in a specific country heavily depends on the service provider. There are three major internet service providers; KT Telecom, SK Telecom, and LG U+.

 

Internally, as in the country (South Korea), speed is amazing due to developed infrastructure and small country size. You will never get a ping more than 10ms when playing games with a server in South Korea and torrent speeds are mostly at least 5MB/s if well seeded. You can say that most people use 100mbps connection and most of the times you get the speed. Even ISPs are offering 1gigabit connections for no more than $10 more a month compared to 100mbps. And yes, they actually reach the speed although the maximum data usage is about 100GB/day. That's still a lot of data compared to how other countries cap internet usage.

 

Now comes when external connections are made other countries. You are forced to use the route through submarine cables that are owned by different ISPs. If you take a look at submarine cable maps, there are numerous that connects Korea to other Asia countries and NA etc. And those numerous cables are operated by different ISPs. That is why you heavily rely on one of the three major ISPs when connecting externally. If I had to rank in experience, the speed/reliability is KT Telecom>>>>>>>>>LG U+>SK Telecom. Even if KT Telecom has existed the longest and invested a lot more on external connections, there is no guarantee that it will be the fastest to all countries. For example, if using KT Telecom you get about 120ms when connecting for HK servers and it is very unreliable. However, using LG U+ you get no more than 50ms and a very reliable connection. However, KT excels in all areas when connecting to NA or using NA sites.

 

With that said along with the heavy censorship/high government and police power when it comes to cyber security that goes around here, it is definitely a terrible place to put a vpn node. Google Korea has put safe filter on default unless you prove you are an adult with a Korean cell phone # or something called ipin that only citizens can get. Same with Youtube and other sites. It is very inconvenient and stupid. I won't go into details, but you would not like it. Even if it had a vpn node, I wouldn't trust any of them more than my default connection. I'd rather use a server in Singapore/HK or US/Canada. By the way, all connections to Europe are horrible, plain horrible. No matter what service you use, you get about 300ms+. So unless AirVPN can get hold of a datacenter that bases its connection on KT Telecom, you will always get horrible reliability and speed unless you plan to visit SK sites from SK.

 

There are probably things like this that people do not know of situations in other countries and this is 100% true to an extent based on my experience with numerous ISPs and living in Korea for a long time. The whole "South Korean internet is the fastest in the world" only applies to internal connections. I'd rather much have my connection routed to a data center that is trustworthy and has good reliability with connections to servers in many countries regardless of geographic location.

[mehāniskākaravīrs935 24]

Thanks for the input folks, it's been quite enlighting to discover the plight of censorship going on there as well as the external ISP dependencies. It would be nice to have a better Asian server, but unless someone can find an alternative it appears Hong Kong and Japan as well as Sinagpore should do the trick for people in the region; one can only hope as I cannot tell because I'm not in the South Pacific region