Garena Free Fire joined a list of banned apps in India last week. The government said the app and 53 others collected sensitive user data “, sent data to servers located in” hostile “countries, and could violate users’ privacy.
Free Fire was also removed from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in India to comply with the ban, while Indian Internet service providers (ISPs) are in the process of blocking access to Free Fire servers.
Reddit’s “/ freefireIndia” series has been noisy since the ban. Many players are busy expressing their disappointment and anger at the Indian government for shutting down the match.
Some concerned players have compared the Free Fire ban to that of PUBG Mobile which came into effect in 2020. Some players have said they have faith in Garena and that it will resolve the conflict soon.
But some players have chosen not to waste their time criticizing the government or asking for Garena. Instead, they have said how they can cross borders and play the game.
Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are the gods of these players. According to a Reddit user, Free Fire is available in India if you use a VPN service.
VPN services allow you to connect devices to private networks directly by encrypting internet traffic. The great advantage of using VPN services, however, is that users can hide their identity online.
This means that the IP address of the device, location, and server source is not displayed on the Internet service provider (ISP).
A Reddit user said that if you can play Free Fire on Airtel online, using a VPN is the way to go beyond the limits. Similarly, users of Jio, Vi, and other broadband services have stated in music that they can easily connect to Free Fire servers via VPNs.
But most VPN services require you to purchase a premium subscription after the free data limit is reached. Prices for these subscriptions are high, so some players, who do not want to pay VPN companies, find another way to avoid restrictions.
They have been able to differentiate between network settings that give them unlimited access to restricted applications by changing their Access Location Names on their network.
Accessibility Names, or APNs, are gateways between mobile networks and Internet servers. Your mobile operator is learning the APN to generate an IP address and connect your device to a secure Internet gateway.
APN consists of two parts: network identifier and operator identifier. Operator identifier is what these players are directed to cross limits because it contains the mobile country code used by your network to establish an internet connection.
Making changes to the country code will change the Internet servers, so when these players use custom APNs, what they are doing is replacing India with an area where the country code should be installed.
By changing the APN, these players are changing the law used by phone companies to restrict access to a website or server, or an IP address.
Free Fire players will continue to use these modes to access the game until Garena solves a problem or comes up with a solution similar to Battlegrounds Mobile India.
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