Internet status in my country (Iran)
Hi everybody,
I am from Iran, I'm 31 and I've lived all of my life in Iran too. Today I decided to write about my country`s internet service status and share our unbelievable problems with my foreign friends.
I'm a web developer so my life is integrated with the Internet and online world. Maybe most of foreign people know anything about internet filtering excepts "parental controls".
Unfortunately in Iran we have many problems in using internet that I decided to write about them.
First of all we have only one exclusive internet provider that is ITC company. In face this company is a part of our government. They filter all of pages that they decided to filter and there is no way to complaint.
This part of our government believe that many sites are the enemy of Islam goals, although in fact they are afraid of their political benefits.
They banned out access to many wonderful online services like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Youtube, Flickr, Dropbox, BBC news, Blogspot blog service and many many others.
Maybe this is unbelievable but it`s real. They don't allow us to use this kind of services because of their benefits. We can't share a video or picture that shows their violence. We can't have a website or weblog with different political ideas.
They limited home users to 128kbit service and getting 256 or 512 kbit services has many difficulties and 1Mbit is impossible. They didn't give people the opportunity to easy communication to other people on the world because it's the best way to limit our peoples. Most of our services has traffic limitation and they are many expensive too. We should pay 25$/month for just a 128kbit service and 9GB/month traffic limit.
On the other hand using internet via satellite is illegal and has jail punishment for 1-2 years. The called western countries spy every one that trying to use this kind of service because is out of their limitation control. they event blocked for example google.fr or google.uk or... to control all accesses via google.com.
I believe that nobody can imagine this except Iranian people. An online world without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, BBC, CNN and etc.
They are working on a public network (Intranet) to replace it with international network (Internet) in Iran.
It's funny but it's our online world.
I've attached a picture that shows to Iranian people when they are trying to go to blocked websites.