The new mobile phone company is dealing with its first headaches. Due to the technological infrastructure, some smartphones are surfing with French IP
After the hype of the official announcement of Iliad offers and the activation of the first SIM cards, the French mobile phone company is starting to come to terms with the first issues and malfunctions. Some, the very first, Italian Iliad users have in fact reported inefficiencies in online browsing on certain websites.
Why is Iliad having these online browsing problems on some portals in Italy? Simple, because as reported by some new users of the phone company in some areas the IP address assigned to users turns out to be French and not Italian. And this therefore creates inefficiencies and geographical blocks while browsing on certain portals. For those who don’t know, an IP address is a unique code that identifies every single device connected to a computer network, both local (LAN) and geographical (Internet is an example). Whether it’s a computer, a smartphone or a network hard disk, it doesn’t matter: whatever device is reachable through the Net, it will be identifiable thanks to its IP address.
Iliad and Internet traffic from France
After the first Iliad users reported, it was discovered that the cause of the malfunction is to be found in the network infrastructure of the new phone company. In some areas of Italy the IP address is French, since the Internet traffic is routed to and from the transalpine country.
In addition to causing slowdowns in browsing, the French IP creates problems with geoblocking: some sites and some multimedia content are not accessible or are accessible only in French. Geoblocking, in fact, makes video content designed for one country not accessible from another (as happens with RaiPlay due to licensing issues) or visible in another language (what happens, for example, with Netflix). Geoblocking, however, can also cause headaches in accessing home banking and ecommerce portals.