Indihome and Netflix. Can I still watch Netflix?
UPDATE: Telkom user can access Netflix since July 07, 2020. You can read the news here. Since Netflix has frozen their ISP leaderboard since February 2020, I can’t show you the network speed comparison to other ISP out there.
My first post. I live in Indonesia and I use Indihome (an ISP managed by Telkom, Indonesia government) for my daily need. When come to entertainment, I usually watching videos from YouTube, Curiosity Stream, Twitch, Khan Academy, and Netflix. YES, NETFLIX. For your information, Indihome is blocking access to Netflix and you can’t watch it.
Here’s the ISP Leaderboard that I got from Netflix ISP Speed Index — February 2020 for Indonesia. Indonesian media already create a post for this and you can find it here.
You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again. For more help, visit netflix.com/proxy
Might some of you thinking to use proxy or VPN? Nope, Netflix will automatically block your access and will pop a message that said “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again. For more help, visit netflix.com/proxy”. I tried to access it using an OpenVPN server that I created in the UK using Digital Ocean Droplet. They might be blacklisting cloud providers and VPN providers IP to their ingress settings. I don’t know much about the details about, but in case you’re using proxy or VPN, forget it. Some VPNs provider claimed their service able to bypass this filtering, I’m not sure about this one since I never try it.
DNS over HTTPS / DNS over TLS works. But sometime it works, sometime it’s not. At least in my computer
BUT even though they’re blocking the access, there is still a way to watch it like using DNS over HTTPS. Cloudflare and Google provide a DNS over HTTPS and your browser can use it. You can google how to set it on your computer and I don’t want to cover it in this article. But I don’t know this method is will keep working in the future. I already tried this method and works once, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Might be something wrong in my browser or my computer configuration.
Network routing is the answer. Why not play a bit with network routing?
Later, I came up with a new idea. My phone’s ISP has a benefit that allows me to watch from Netflix without charging me and it’s “unlimited” (they still have FUP — Fair Usage Policy though, but quite fast. Even after I got a warning from them after extensive usage).
Why not create a routing table that directing all Netflix traffic to my phone (by WiFi tethering) and let other traffic served under Indihome (UTP cable CAT6)? I know this method has many weaknesses like you can’t using this method in case you’re working with wireless connection due to limitation to connect to single SSID, your phone battery will be drained up quickly because maintain the tethering connection, and many more. But it works :D
So I create a python script and combine it with Linux ip route command to route all the traffic to my phone and let the other route via default gateway in my case is Indihome’s network. I know there’s a python library named pyroute2, but I choose to reduce the number of dependency in my code and since I use Linux most of the time, why don’t we use built-in Linux tools? You can found the script here. The script is really simple, get the public IP from Netflix ASN and add a routing table on your device. Done. Simple and works.
Now I can fully utilize both of my ISP and mobile ISP’s benefit and manage my bandwidth efficiently. I know there are weaknesses in this method, but this method works and if you have any idea of improvement in this method, let me know :)
