Residential VPN's in Today's World

For the past 15 years nearly every business that needed ip addresses went to their favorite data center, selected where they wanted their server located, and obtained commercial ip addresses nearly instantly. Towards the end of these past 15 years though, data center and commercial ip addresses started getting mass banned from social media networks, advertising facilities, account setup/creation, and nearly all online tv and radio streaming platforms.

What happened? This is a story that has many angles, but the most notable is that anyone in the world can obtain commercial ip addresses very easily. With the invention and releases of cloud platforms, and our standard data centers always ready to serve up our latest server needs, business class ip addresses are readily available in the hundreds to thousands on only a moments notice.

During the years, social media platforms, advertising account operators, and network administrators in general started evaluating who was really using their networks. What was revealed is that more than 75% of traffic was being created by data center and commercial ip providers and not local internet service providers. It wasn't the normal everyday ip address from home that operators were seeing. It was all business class ip addresses. This told the network operators that a potential abusive situation could possibly be in the works as the user behind the business class ip address could not be independently verified. The network operators could not verify whether the user was actually in the country they were supposed to be in. With this being the case, they had to start the implementation of blocking known data center/business class ip ranges. I believe it was the geographically licensed online tv platforms that started this first.

Back in 2008 you could still watch the BBC's iPlayer with a standard business class ip address issued through nearly any United Kingdom data center. It was the glory days of vpn providers as the bandwidth was unlimited at very high data transfer rates and ip's were bountiful. Again, those glory days are long gone. In today's modern society, network administrators and content providers are much smarter in who and what type of ip address can access their content. Most streaming platforms today focus on whether the users ip address comes from a data center or from a home dsl or cable line. If its from a data center, its pretty much instantly denied access to their content. If its a genuine home residential ip address then you are welcomed with loving arms. But that is not all they look for any more either. Some streaming platforms now want a complete address or zip code to complement the residential ip address. In the future I believe these checks will continue to become more stringent as residential ip's are now being deployed by more and more vpn companies everyday. Its only a matter of time before the stream owners up the ante in this game.