Telegram block in Vietnam results in overall slowdown of ALL internet traffic

This is not something that is being admitted by anyone in charge or by the companies that were charged with making it happen. That's now how things work here. I am basing this off of the situations that we who live here are all experiencing and it is too widespread to be just a coincidence.

It all began about a week ago when the Vietnamese government ordered all ISP's and mobile service providers to block access to the messaging app Telegram and they cited "national security concerns" as the reasoning behind the ban on the app.

I experienced it first hand when the rollout of blocking happened and here we are a week later and ALL internet access has been affected by this, not just access to Telegram.

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There is no official statement about what is actually going on but let me explain to you how life works in Vietnam that is very different from living in a lot of other countries that perhaps you live in. When the government here decides to do something they normally will stick to their guns regardless of what the consequences of their actions ends up being. In other countries, such as western ones like USA or Canada, if the government rolled out something that resulted in massive unintended side-effects the people would complain, news stations would report on it, people might be held liable, and whatever the things was that was the cause of the problem in the first place, might be rolled back with at least some convenient excuses, but maybe even some apologies. Not in Vietnam.

The media and society at large is mostly at the complete control of the government, whether they are right or wrong doesn't even factor in. I am by no means and expert on Vietnamese government-workings or even technology for that matter, but I do know that if you try to be a complainer guy that points things out too much, you will almost certainly not invoke change, you are just going to get visited by some stoic people in green uniforms and probably go on a extended and unintentional vacation for a while.

So at the moment there is just speculation as to what is going on right now but the widespread result of Vietnam's block on the Telegram app, almost everything else that people use the internet for has gotten a lot slower in the past week as well.

I first noticed it when streaming services in my condo started having a lot of slowdown issues that it never had before. I did a speed test and it wasn't so much a case of overall slowdown in speed, but instead major spikes in internet availability at all.

This could be caused by a lot of things, but many people with more tech knowledge than me are suggesting that Vietnam is attempting to introduce as China-like single point of entry to overall internet access. This will created bottlenecks no matter how you try to do it.

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In order to completely block an app like Telegram, all network traffic has to be analyzed before exiting and entering the country. You can look at this kind of like border control as far as people are concerned. If you leave the border of a country wide open, people can move to and from it very quickly, but if you force everyone to go through a particular gate in order to go to and from, there are going to become long lines and long waits.

The same could be said of the 1's and 0's that is internet traffic. If someone or a government wants to be able to control all that is flowing through, there simply is no way to do it other than to have it all corralled into one specific area before it is sent out or received. No matter how technologically advanced the various pieces of the puzzle are, all people involved are going to be subjected to the speed of the central piece is that is involved in approving or disapproving whatever it is that is going through there.

I have been finding the attempt at eliminating Telegram as a messaging service as a minor inconvenience because it merely involves adding a VPN to my repertoire and I think this is something that people should be doing anyway. For the most part it is a very easy and straight-forward process, but there are other caveats such as certain apps on phones, such as very popular banking apps, that will not function if a VPN is being used. There are of course, workarounds for things like this, but for most people, it is just more trouble than it is worth.

In the past, when serious and continual slowdowns in internet access has happened, various ISP's pointed the finger at "sharks attacking undersea cables" but they are not making that tired and lame excuse this time. This time they have just said nothing at all but we all kind of know what is going on.

There is nobody to complain to and you just have to accept things like this when you live here. If you become the squeaky wheel, the only change you are likely to invoke is the change of you no longer being allowed to live here.

In the past Vietnam has blocked several things in the internet, including, strangely, Reddit and BBC. I don't know why but blocking URL's is a very different thing than blocking entire apps and the only really scary thing is that if they are successful in completely blocking Telegram, the people who ordered this in the first place will probably see it as a win and continue down this path of censorship so that it expends to many other things. In the meantime, use a VPN and everything will function as it always did, but at least for now, it is going to be slower.