Aiyah! Thought I was so lucky when I got that 118 number… one time when the TM Help Desk’s advice to ‘try switching off and on’ is actually relevant! I’ve had 118 addresses since Feb 17, when I restarted my Streamyx contract, but only noticed problems with LKS blog.

Another alternative to using a proxy is to use one of the search engine’s ‘translate’ pages. I do that to check sites I host from my own desk. Just copy and paste the URL from LKS’ blog into (for example) translate.google…, select translate from (for example) Spanish into English. Tada! You get the page from Google! I’ve a feeling they strictly limit the number of times you can use the translate service in any period. Then again, I think most proxies limit the number of times you can use them for free.

how does it propose to compensate
As usual, show you the way to KLIA!

I changed my 118 address for a 60 address earlier by unplugging the telephone line from the modem for a few seconds. Plug back in, and I get a new IP address after a few seconds more. I think I got about six 118 addresses and one 115 address before I finally got a 60 address. Try it! It could become the new Malaysian lottery!

I leave my modem switched on constantly (I host some projects from my desk), so I should have that for a few weeks. If you only switch on when you go online, you’ll have to go through the funny routine every time you want to ‘fish’ for a 60 address.

how I can bypass Telekom Malaysia’s backbone
You can, but almost all the options are expensive and crap. Satellite really does work, but it’s quite a long distance for short-wave radio to travel, so rain can cause it problems, particularly tropical rain. Also, the bandwidth available ‘upstream’ is very expensive – most home installations either have very low transmit-to-satellite bandwidth or use your telephone for sending requests, responses arriving from orbit as usual. You can use home satellite for Voice Over Internet, but it would be a disappointing experience, unless you live in the Arctic or the middle of the Pacific and you’ve never experienced anything else. It would be all right, if expensive and slow, for plain old browsing. If you use an out-of-Malaysia (the satellite ground station is overseas) satellite company, and your satellite dish was well designed and maintained, info you transmit would be secure. The information you receive is broadcast from orbit, so any dish can see what you’re receiving. That’s slightly better than normal wireless, where it’s broadcast both ways.

You could convince some friends to invest in a submarine cable, but I suspect there’s a legal problem – something to do with ownership of the coastline and local seabed. Also, that’s a very expensive option: if you weren’t able to sell bandwidth from it, the cost would be prohibitive. Going by the ruling on FibreComm, I don’t fancy your chances of getting a licence to sell wired access: you might start a monopoly! I think if you could sort out the legal aspect, submarine cable would be the way to go.

You could use microwave dishes to a nearby country. They also suffer from atmospheric conditions, and I suspect you’d need some very expensive licence to operate high power radio equipment. Cheaper to licence would be packet radio over amateur radio bands, but you’d need a community of people who wouldn’t mess up the licensing side of things by trying to charge for access.

There is one super-cheap no-licensing method that might just work over a border, and that’s visible light: there’s an open-source project called RONJA from Twibright Labs that uses visible red light (not lasers, so no health issue) to carry 10Mbit/s traffic over a kilometre or so. You’d need 2 friendly people in sight of each other on either side of a border, and a network of people to extend it. You could always try VPNs on the local networks if you were desperate. Although it isn’t laser, the light is lensed, so for someone to snoop your traffic, I think they’d have to get quite close to the line of sight between the two ends – covert snooping would be much harder than with radio.

One last option, something I just dreamed up while typing, is to try to get something running using NASA’s / Vint Cerf’s InterPlaNet – a delay-tolerant network. All you’d need is a friendly taxi / courier / pizza delivery company somewhere near a border, even a dedicated man-on-a-bike (or several) would do. They’d just drive back and forth between your office and the office on the non-TM network, swapping a drive full of data for a new one at each end. Bandwidth could be vast – possibly GB/s but latency would be awful, it would be like mission control for some deep-space probe. Great for email and p2p, terrible for browsing (for new content, for older than 20 minutes it makes no difference) and impossible for gaming or Voice Over Internet.

Apart from your own submarine cable, all of these methods would have little problems and quirks, and if you did them yourself, you’d probably experience frequent outages and slow-downs. At least you’d know who to shout at! Satellite is the only real option for avoiding TM’s network altogether (but you would have to avoid companies whose ground station is in Malaysia) – all the other options depend on you being close to a border, or having a continuous network of friends all the way!

Now that Malaysia has joined the space race, perhaps we should build our own satellite network? The jalur gemilang is a great flag (moon and star) for a space-faring nation, it’s such a pity really…