I recently shifted back to Airtel broadband partly due to incompetence of BSNL engineers to fix the frequent disconnection issue with my connection, and partly because Airtel is now offering much cheaper high speed 8 Mbps and 16 Mbps plans.
The first thing I noticed after the move was that airtel has blocked a lot of torrent websites in compliance with some court order. While I am still not sure why those orders are not applicable on state owned BSNL broadband and Airtel 3G for that matter, I did not want to argue with airtel about this. So I started looking for alternatives. I found a couple of them, out of which the following two are my most preferred ones:
1. Coral Content Distribution Network:
Just append whatever blocked URL you want to access with .nyud.net and the site will be served via the Coral CDN. For example, if you want to open torrentz.eu, point your browser to torrentz.eu.nyud.net instead. This is the simplest and in my opinion the most convenient way to bypass the aforesaid idiosyncrasy.
2. Tor:
Download & install Tor from https://www.torproject.org/. Start Tor and it will open up your default browser with Tor enabled, which you can use to open any site anonymously. Tor is also an effective way to maintain privacy while browsing.
While the above two workarounds will fix most of your issues, there will still be a few nagging bits left. For example, I use Reeder on my macbook to catch up on my Google reader feeds. Many articles have embedded vimeo videos which are blocked. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until they revoke the absurd order to fix such issues. Until then, use the above two alternatives and enjoy!
