WILL YOUR FREEDOM LET ME BROWSE FOR FREE?

Mobile connections (GSM/GPRS/3G/UMTS)

More and more people are using Your Freedom via mobile connectons (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, 3G services). While Your Freedom works across mobile connections too (though not yet on mobile devices), there are some restrictions that need your consideration. This page tries to answer the most common questions and tries to point out the caveats.

If you are from Nigeria or another country where people usually connect to the Internet through phone networks then this page is for you!

Will Your Freedom replace my Internet connection?

No. Your Freedom can only work across an existing Internet connection. Your Freedom is meant to remove restrictions that your current Internet connection imposes on you, it is not meant to replace it completely. We are not a reseller of some network operator or the like, and we do not operate any mobile networks.

Do you have your own SIM cards?

No. We are not a local loop provider, we do not operate access connections and we do not operate mobile networks, nor are we a reseller of any mobile network provider.

What modem/phone do you recommend?

You should ask your mobile network provider, not us (and you probably shouldn't mention "Your Freedom" when you do). We just provide a service on top. You wouldn't ask us about the right type of keyboard or a recommendation of a screen either.

Will Your Freedom let me browse for free?

Maybe. We do offer a free service (and it's of course free as the name suggests) but unless your mobile provider's network has holes that permit the YF client to connect to the server without paying for the service you still need to pay your mobile provider for data access. If you think you can use the Internet for free through us then you may be right with some providers; check out blogs and forums on the Internet. We've seen public wireless access points that could be fooled and there might be broken WAP gateways.

In short, we have found that in some cases the answer is "yes". See the country information pages. Please keep in mind though that this is a side-effect of Your Freedom's intention of bypassing censorship, not an intentional, guaranteed property of our service. If it works, fine.

Will Your Freedom make my mobile Internet connection faster?

We cannot make your connection faster than it physically is, but we may be able to use it more efficiently, for example if your provider routes traffic in a sub-optimal way. More likely, however, the connection will be slightly slower because of the protocol overhead.

If your uploads and downloads hit the physical limit of your Internet connection, there is nothing Your Freedom can do about this. If you are connecting through a GSM network your typical speed will be around 50 kbit/s and the round trip time will be around 700 ms, with Your Freedom as well as without. UMTS/3G generally provides higher data rates and faster response times (a typical rate is 250 kbit/s and a typical round trip time is 200 ms, but your provider and/or mobile device may have other limitations). You'll find more details further down the page.

You may have heard that Your Freedom actually improves responsiveness for some. The only thing Your Freedom can do something about is sub-optimal routing by your provider. If your provider has good connectivity to our servers but bad connectivity to (for example) gaming servers, using Your Freedom may actually improve your connection to these servers.

Let me tell you a bit about mobile Internet connections. No matter what your provider says, it's not a real Internet connection (i.e. it is not using TCP/IP). Mobile networks emulate some protocols from the TCP/IP protocol suite, among them TCP, UDP and ICMP. They only do it to a certain degree and in most cases the emulation is not entirely transparent (for example, many providers reduce the quality of JPEG images when browsing Internet web pages to conserve bandwidth). To avoid applications running into timeouts all the time, many signal a successful TCP SYN-SYNACK-ACK handshake even though an end-to-end connection hasn't been established yet. They are not doing it to pester you, but to ensure the best possible service over a network that is not very well suited for the TCP/IP protocol suite. This may all sound very technical to you but the bottom line is easy to understand: it's not a true Internet connection and you should not expect it to do miracles. You can use Your Freedom to turn the emulated Internet connection into a real one (from the protocol perspective) and this may improve your "Internet experience", but trust me -- it won't be faster. It might work better though.