Dubai vs VOIP

⚠️ Time Capsule Alert! ⚠️

This post is a digital fossil excavated from my ancient blog archives. Like finding your embarrassing high school photos, this content represents Past Me™ (who knew significantly less than Current Me).

Side effects may include: broken links, missing images, and opinions I’ve since upgraded. My brain has received several critical software updates since writing this.

For the latest version of my thoughts (now with 73% fewer bugs!), please check out my more recent posts.

Dubai vs VOIP

Dubai, or should I say UAE have had an ever long issue with VoIP. Club it with the costly telecom plans compared to other countries, it becomes borderline impossible to talk to people back in India.

People generally resort to VPN, but I find that to be a very un-natural way of making calls. Mind you, I’m very pro-VPN. In fact, I like the improved privacy and have fiddled with OpenVPN back in Bangalore days a lot.

TBH, having VPN established on your phone or laptop just to make a call back home feels weird and unstable. It is illegal to that; even if that were not the case it is a dependency. And there is the added disadvantage that VPN it blocked as well, which result in loss of bandwidth, and effects the VoIP.

What happens in my thought

VoIP service is not blocked as a capability. You can still recieve WhatsApp calls for example (but you would not be able to talk)

The applications can’t be blocked by tampering with the app distribution (creating regional app distribution channels) and the solution would not scale as there are 172 countries and some or the other country would make an app which couldn’t be controlled

The internet access (through telcoms) can though restrict these services based on the IPs required for the VoIP services to run. But this would again be not scalable as the application IPs can change really easily (that also suggests me to check how does the parental control and similar feature work)

If all kinds of VoIP services work on certains ports - such as HTTPS 443, HTTP 80 etc. one way to block all the connectivity would be block all the ports

Doing a country wide parental control is not easy. Security team must be working really hard to make this possible.

I think this is very backwards and have more disadvantageous than it improves security

• Visitors would want to show loved ones back home good things about Dubai and they can’t because they can’t do a video call
• Expats who decided to stay here long term need to find new ways of breaking the law using VPN and new, unauthorized applications and software
• It would be considerable amount of effort required to maintain this block
• Startups are effected a lot, especially the remote culture
• The allowed applications that enable this service even at a cost are not good to be minimum, they are full of ads to push people away

With so many concerns, it seems rather obvious that there would be more content-fullness and improvements by allowing VoIP than by blocking it for whole public. Maybe, I should understand this deeper and talk to poeple who know more about why and how this started.

Allowing Totok and this article provoked this train of thought - https://www.khaleejtimes.com/technology/now-make-free-video-calls-in-uae-on-updated-app-

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!!

• Find out how does parental control over network work
• Find out history for VoIP ban