Myanmar Internet Connectivity – Essential to Holding Power
Since the beginning of February 2021, when a military junta deposed the democratically elected members of Myanmar’s ruling party, the country has seen an accelerated deterioration of internet freedoms. The new authorities have ordered telecom operators to regularly switch off the internet and impose sweeping restrictions on websites, services and apps in order to stifle free speech and prevent opponents from organizing protests.
Speedify believes in a free and open internet for all, and treats access to the internet as a basic human right.
With Speedify, your internet stays on when one connection fails.
At the start of the conflict, Speedify offered users in Myanmar free Speedify accounts with 50 GB per month. Here is what has happened since then.
Nightly Shutdowns, Daily Restrictions
From mid-February 2021, the internet was turned off nightly nationwide from 1 AM to 9 AM. During the hours when the internet was available, specific websites and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were blocked. The military government also drafted a new cybersecurity law that would give it full power over everyone’s internet access.
According to the New York Times, the military government’s method of choice for restricting internet connectivity is to decouple website addresses from the numerical address a computer needs to look up specific sites. In practice, this is similar to listing a wrong number under a person’s name in a phonebook, a technique known as DNS filtering or DNS spoofing. See more on that in this comprehensive article on how internet censorship works.
Circumventing Government Restrictions by Using VPNs
To get around these restrictions while the internet was on, people in Myanmar turned to VPNs. A VPN encrypts all the traffic to and from your device, so others can’t see what you’re doing online. Speedify is an app that encrypts traffic the same way and can also combine several internet connections at once.
At the time of writing in February 2021, Speedify had seen no coordinated attempt to block its service in Myanmar. Speedify has methods for working through firewalls, and apart from the hours when the internet was switched off entirely, Speedify stayed reachable.
A Surge in Speedify Usage
Disclaimer: as stated in Speedify’s privacy policy, Speedify keeps no record of the websites you visit and does not sell personal data. Speedify does record connection details (IP address, device ID, connection time and data used) and counts how many users connect to each server, which shows where and when to add capacity. The figures below come from those server counts.
Here are some Myanmar traffic stats from Speedify from the first three weeks of February 2021:
- Before February 7, 2021, Speedify had fewer than 100 users per day in Myanmar.
- Usage and installs from Myanmar spiked twice, on February 7 and February 13, both weekends.
- In the first three weeks of February 2021, more than 490,000 unique users connected to Speedify from Myanmar.
- Users in Myanmar mainly connected to servers in India, Singapore and the USA, and used more than 370 different servers in total.
Why People in Myanmar Chose Speedify in 2021
According to Statista, the internet penetration rate in Myanmar in 2019 was around 31%. At a population of 54 million, that means around 17 million people had internet access. Nearly half a million unique users in Myanmar ran Speedify, which means about 3% of Myanmar’s internet users chose Speedify as their VPN.
Part of the reason is that Speedify was free for users in Myanmar. Performance is likely another reason: Speedify combines internet connections and uses header compression and error correction, which help keep it fast on slow, unreliable connections.
Speedify’s aim is to keep the service available to people who need access to a free and open internet.
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