Best VPNs for North Korea

We owe a thank you to the person known as the “Friendly North Korean Observer”, as his findings provide a great deal of information about the North Korean situation. Among others, we found out that if we think about satellites, Intelsat is the most possible candidate as the supplier. However, data packets also indicate that most of the traffic goes through China Unicom, the neighboring country’s telecommunications company. Since internet access is restricted to areas like internet cafés or certain journalistic offices, the Friendly Observer revealed that next to Red Star OS (the North Korean Linux version) CentOS and even MacBooks are used operating systems. What is even more interesting from the perspective of the people using the internet there is that data reveals Virtual Networks and VMware in the use. Thus, accessing other countries’ internet from North Korea is most possibly done, for whatever reasons.

The online legal framework of North Korea is fine tuned to the ideology prevailing in the country – Juche. This means that virtually all other online content that does not show affiliation towards this thought is either heavily regulated or not allowed at all inside North Korean borders. Given the nature of this ideology, the laws suggest a highly patriarchal state of online content, where barely anything associated with other countries is available. Very few IP addresses exist for North Korea outside their own network. Therefore, trying to access those (and not the global IP addresses of the country) is not advised by any means.

As a consequence of North Korea having its own strictly limited version of the internet, the streaming services of any other country are not available in North Korea. Furthermore, since most of the online content of the country is restricted to its territory, the only credible source of accessing North Korean television is through people who have defected the state. The site Korean Central TV Stream is a good example of this activity. In order to access content providers from elsewhere in the world such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime, it’s indispensable to use a VPN service that is successful in bypassing the restrictions of internet access in North Korea while unblocking the content in a fast and easy manner.

For the above reasons, North Korea does not have any VPN services allowed within its borders. Therefore, if you are interested in connecting to North Korea or connecting to somewhere else from North Korea, we suggest some alternatives. Mobile phones are a way to access North Korean domains for outsiders through 3G. As mentioned before, Virtual Networking or VMware and other virtual networking tools and solutions (might) be another possibility, while some VPN providers may at certain times be able to unblock content for users residing within North Korean borders.