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Moroccan ISP's have blocked VOIP services since yesterday.. and we are looking for a way to counter it, even if we have to use a paid service.

We'd like to get around this block - Could I use a paid vpn, or would the ISP be able to detect this and block it, or is there a more trivial way, such as changing the port I am connected through?

The blocked services are : Skype (can not connect) , Facebook video calling (the windows pop up but the call doesn't work and the connection times out) , whatsup (shows a message informing us that we can not perform the call)

I run windows 7

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  • I'd suggest rewording the question to focus more on the actual problem, and trimming off some of the less essential bits. I'll give it a go, but feel free to adjust the question somewhat
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 28, 2016 at 12:18
  • Useful information might include what VOIP services are blocked.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 28, 2016 at 12:20
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    Relevant dslreports link: Morocco phone company blocking all VoIP services
    – DavidPostill
    Feb 28, 2016 at 13:43
  • Yes :( we are looking for a counter no matter what ! its a shame :( Feb 28, 2016 at 20:34

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A VPN is your best bet. It is possible for providers to try and analyse what is going through the VPN by looking at the packet sizes and timing of transmissions, but this would only help them make a guess, and is very likely to be implemented. (If it were common, I'm sure that OpenVPN would have introduced functionality to allow stuffing packets and modifying timing)

With respect of performance, Paul is absolutely correct, VPN's will decrease performance and make high quality VOIP harder to implement. You need to try and keep your latency as low as possible, and your jitter low - which means finding a good VPN provider more-or-less in the path your VOIP packets would take, and who are connected well enough not to add latency. VOIP will still work without this, but you will degrade quality (eg by causing echo issues, and noticeable delays between when a sentence is started and when its heard). Ideally VOIP traffic should be kept under 30ms - although in a lot of cases this is not practical - From the Island I live on in the South Pacific, the speed of light dictates minimum times of over 100ms to the USA - and VOIP works fine.

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  • Thanks a lot Davidgo for the answer i will try a vpn as soon as possible hopefully it will work :) Feb 28, 2016 at 20:37
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Any traffic inside a VPN is indistinguishable to any other, for an outside observer. So to block VoIP over VPN, all VPN traffic would need to be blocked.

However, voice traffic is very sensitive to timing, so the overhead of encryption/decryption plus the extra routing through the VPN provider could put enough overhead on the connection to degrade quality.

The best bet is to find a "near" VPN provider and talk to them about their service and voip. Then ensure the endpoints doing the VPN are fast, so they can run the encryption and decryption quickly.

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  • Thanks a lot Paul , i will try to purchase a near vpn and test it monday , i wll keep you updated. thanks a lot for your answer. Feb 28, 2016 at 11:55
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Perhaps you could try an alternative like Skype, or Google Hangouts. I don't believe it would be possible for them to block Google Hangouts.

A VPN could work in theory, however as has been mentioned, the network quality may not be sufficient for voice calls.

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    Hello , thanks for you answer, i think they are blocking everything using voip , for skype we can not even connect to it anymore... Feb 28, 2016 at 12:00
  • When I was in Saudi Arabia, the trick was to use lesser known apps/services. While Skype was heavily throttled, WhatsApp and Viber calling blocked, what always worked best for me was Google Hangouts. But it means you have to tell the people you want to talk to to get this app first.
    – TJJ
    Feb 28, 2016 at 13:36
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My company (Telestar LTD) is making VoIP based iPhone and Android apps. We have incorporated a built-in VPN solution in some of our iPhone apps to overcome the recent blocking of VoIP services in Saudi Arabia, so I can confirm a VPN solution will work. However I agree that not all VPN services may provide the best quality given the additional overhead.

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VPN is not the best solution for VoIP, because:

  • requires third party VPN client or VPN client settings by the end-user
  • DPI firewalls can easily block it (for example by just checking for the VoIP nature of the streams. e.g. same continuous upload and download)
  • A general VPN is not VoIP aware (jitter, packet loss and delays are not considered)
  • Subpar performance and slow connects

For a decent quality you should use some software encryption/tunneling specialized for VoIP or find out softphones which has these built-in. For example mizutech offers a VoIP tunneling solution which can be integrated with VoIP softphones and gateways. You can find other specific solutions here. These are valid if there is a strong filtering. If the filtering is weaker then even a simple XOR on UDP with a fix key is fine which can be easily added to any VoIP software.

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