Data roaming

I bricked my Nexus S yesterday, while trying to root it (with an howto for an old Android version). As usual I was trying to do too much stuff with too little time (as I had to catch my plane later that evening).

I had to root it to get OpenVPN, ssh tunnel, or system wide proxies up and running. Things I needed to by-pass the Great Firewall in China on my mobile.

However, when landing in Beijing, and connecting to Twitter, Facebook, and all that other shizzle on my “backup” Nexus S; I noticed all sites were working just fine. Just a tad slow…

I was amazed. As if someone turned off the Great Firewall… 😉

But apparently, when checking what public IP my phone had, it was a Belgian IP address. So basically it seems when roaming, all traffic is rerouted from, say, China Mobile to Proximus (through a VPN?), and routed to the internet, in my case, from Belgium. Which is pretty cool here in China. Means I can access everything as if I were in Belgium.

Anyway, something I didn’t know. Learned something new today. 😉