VPN restrictions are escalating fast across multiple countries. Posting my notes since I had to figure this out for myself and the search results are total mess.
Quick reality check on where things stand, because half the headlines are wrong:
The UK has not banned VPNs outright. What did happen: Lords passed Amendment 92 in January 2026 targeting VPN provision to under-18s, Commons rejected it on 9 March (321-106), and the government has a consultation running with a statement expected July 2026. Direction of travel is clear. Age-verification under the Online Safety Act has been live since 25 July 2025, and that’s the bigger problem because ID-binding is something a VPN can’t solve.
Russia has been actively blocking VPN protocols via DPI for years. China, Iran, UAE the same. Turkey added more services to its block list through 2025-2026.
Platform-level detection got much worse. Consumer VPN IP ranges (Nord, Proton, Surfshark) are pre-flagged on most banking, payment, and social platforms. Even when the VPN connects, sites refuse you or send you into a captcha loop. In this case decentralized (unbannable) VPNs don’t solve anything.
If you already have a UK-based account on a site that age-gated you, switching to a different IP later doesn’t unlock it. The verification is bound to the account, you need to create new one in most cases.
The VPN is one tool being asked to solve three different problems (location, identity, encryption) and only ever really solved the first one. The problem is the actual VPN protocol that is being detected like Open VPN, Wireguard. Then Resi/DC IP range problem comes.
What works now:
A no-KYC eSIM that exits in another country. The eSIM gives the device a foreign mobile carrier IP at the network level. No VPN protocol involved, so DPI has nothing to fingerprint. The carrier IP is shared (CGNAT) with thousands of real phone users, so it doesn’t get banned the way a VPN range does, and it doesn’t get flagged as VPN/proxy by platforms. Since the eSIM is no-KYC, the ISP-level identity link is broken too. Use the eSIM as a hotspot to your laptop and your whole machine exits through a foreign carrier without running any VPN software.
Not a full privacy solution. Carrier still sees the eSIM IMEI, IP is still logged at the network layer, and the eSIM itself adds no encryption. What it does solve is the routing and identity-binding pieces that VPNs are failing at.
No-KYC eSIM providers with foreign IP routing that I tested:
Silent Link. Accepts XMR and major cryptocurrencies. Single exit IP option per plan, recently moved from Poland to UK. Most trusted name in the space, longest track record.
Nadanada. Accepts XMR and major cryptocurrencies. Three routing options at the moment (UK / Singapore / USA).
Voidmob. Accepts XMR and major cryptocurrencies. Global routing options with filtering.
PikaSim. Accepts XMR and major cryptocurrencies. Global routing options no filtering.
All four skip KYC, take crypto, and any of them can be used as a hotspot to your PC for full-machine routing without VPN software.
If your threat model needs actual encryption on top, layer a VLESS Xray setup or a encrypted proxy over the eSIM connection. For most personal use though, eSIM-only is enough to fix what VPNs are running into.
Thank you for your effort. There is an update on Russia. According to local lawmakers, next government initiative will result in full prohibition of foreign e-sim registration. Projected execution timeline is from 2 to 3 months.
Please send over the source, for now you have to wait 24hrs and your eSIM starts working. Anyway, mobile proxies will be still a solution, in some cases Vless as well.
It is all over local segment of internet. Here is one of the sources, Russian only.
Other than that IMO VLESS, proxies and similar solutions are useless against government issued traffic limitations, such as projected price increase per GB. That rules out basically all private individuals in favor of big corporate entities which get to keep their access to VPN and other candy.
People shouldn’t go and spend money on expensive eSIM plans. You have to be realistic about the scale of the internet censorship in Russia and China, it just wouldn’t happen in the UK. The ruling party will loose the elections to the right before they could spend billions on a DPI infrastructure. And it’d be impossible to do overnight, as they’ll have to pass and enforce a ton of laws regulating backbone ISP providers.
In reality, none of that is happening in the UK currently.
Why would you obfuscate your traffic even further if the esim plan supposedly would bypass DPI?
Fair on the UK DPI scale, I conflated four countries when the situations are very different. UK is platform-level VPN detection + OSA age verification, not Russian-grade DPI, you’re right to separate those.
On the obfuscation question, eSIM solves the destination side (sites see a foreign mobile IP). VLESS solves the source side (the local network you’re connecting through can’t read or block the traffic). Two different problems. In the UK you only need the first, in RU/CN/Iran you usually need both because the local ISP is the adversary, not just the destination site. That’s why the post mentions layering only “if your threat model needs it” rather than as a default.
For context, the whole premise of Xray was domain/CDN fronting. The only thing separating “VLESS Xray” from plain VLESS is UDP packet encoding and the VLESS flow (xtls-rprx-vision). The technology was needed because censors in China, Russia and Iran can’t outright ban CDN ranges without taking down half the legitimate internet as collateral. It was built for that specific case, so none of it applies to the UK.
So the first suggestion was eSIM → UK site. Then it became eSIM → VLESS → somewhere → UK site. Now VLESS is back a third time as the “source side” fix - but you’ve already granted the UK has no Russian-grade DPI. The only thing VLESS adds over Wireguard is hiding the easy to spot handshake pattern from that DPI, and without it Wireguard keeps working fine. VLESS is solving a problem that doesn’t exist here. And if you’re setting up domain fronting that routes to an exit capable of reaching the UK sites, the eSIM isn’t doing anything - Wireguard does the same routing with better performance. “If your threat model needs it” doesn’t answer any of this, it just skips it.
And if the eSIM handles the UK on its own, that same user could just split-route and use their UK ISP/carrier for UK sites and the same VPN app for everything else. The eSIM is traceable to them anyway.
I don’t see the problem you’re solving here, there isn’t one.
To me it reads like an AI slop just name-dropping to make things seem more complicated than they need to be, and i’m sorry for being such a bully!
this can and will eventually be blocked.
the tower you connect to and authenticate with has to forward that onward to the actual issuing carrier server, they can just choose to not permit “external” carriers and then you’re immediately cut off.
The key with non-KYC eSIMs that they use real carriers like T-Mobile and so on. So they can’t be blocked. Whole anon eSIM point is that it allows you to get an eSIM without KYC and crypto payments. All these providers absorb that for you.
That doesn’t change the matter, they are still foreign carriers routed through state owned towers. Russia et al can block them and force everyone through local carriers which are kyc only.
When you buy RU eSIM with UK IP for example, it’s still connected to the local carrier like Beeline or Tele2. The actual eSIM infra sits in UK for example, so it lands to UK at the end. Yes it adds latency but it actually works. So in this case you are wrong sorry.
Most reporters claim that a 16kb block is also present, which indicates that both passive and active censorship methods, i.e dns poisoning + ip blocklists as well as DPI are in place now, but not uniformly at least for now, which is normal, given that DPI rollout is gradual.
It was explained to me that ISPs either downgraded the GTP-U to unencrypted or it was simply never encrypted.
I guess this thread can be closed. If European countries were to deploy DPI, they will obviously patch every DPI bypass route out there, as was argued previously.
It’s also naive to think your ISP-level identity link would be broken.
→ UK site. Now VLESS is back a third time as the “source side” fix - but you’ve already granted the UK has no Russian-grade DPI. The only thing VLESS adds over Wireguard is hiding the easy to spot handshake pattern from that DPI, and without it Wireguard keeps working fine. VLESS is solving a problem that doesn’t exist here. And if you’re setting up domain fronting that routes to an exit capable of reaching the UK sites, the eSIM isn’t doing anything - Wireguard does the same routing with better performance. “If your threat model needs it” doesn’t answer any of this, it just skips it.