I did a post before on Watching Netflix In Singapore With UnoTelly SmartDNS and today, I will be featuring an alternative to UnoTelly which is Unblock-Us.

Unblock-Us was started in 2010 in Toronto, Canada. They are the first company in the world to offer a DNS-based solution (SmartDNS) to give people access to content not available in their location. They strongly believe in anonymity and privacy and hence they moved their operations to Barbados in response to the proposed Canadian legislation which would have required them to keep logs on their customer activities for 6 months.

Unblock-Us
Unblock-Us

Unblock-Us supports about 150 services ranging from video on Demand like Netflix and Hulu/Hulu Plus, online TV watching like BBC and ABC, kids content like The Disney Channel and Disney Junior, sports content like MLB and NBA and music streaming like Pandora and Rdio.

Setup
Unblock-Us behaves the same as UnoTelly and you configure it by either setting up a VPN or changing the DNS on your router. I prefer changing my router DNS because that means that any device that is connected to the router will be able to access the overseas content.

Unblock-Us has three DNS and just have to enter it in your router’s DNS page.

  • 208.122.23.23
  • 208.122.23.22
  • 184.106.242.193

I am using Linksys EA9200 Wireless AC3200 Tri Band Smart Wi-Fi Router and here is what the DNS page will look like.

Unblock-Us DNS
Unblock-Us DNS

Chromecast
Because Chromecast doesn’t use your router DNS, instead it uses the hardcoded Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) inside it, you will have to block the two IP on your router end. For Linksys EA9200, I am using the Static Route feature in the router to do it.

If you look at the gateway IP address, it is a non-valid local IP as my DHCP only starts from 100.

I blocked Open DNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) as well just in case.

Unblock-Us Static Routes
Unblock-Us Static Routes

Prices
In terms of pricing, there is only one plan for Unblock-Us and two payment period (monthly and yearly), this makes it less confusing than UnoTelly.

It cost US$4.99/month (S$6.70/month) if you choose to pay monthly or US$49.90/year (S$67/year) if you choose to pay annually.

VPN
The VPN provided by Unblock-Us is not actually a true VPN unlike UnoTelly because instead of sending all your traffic through a VPN, they only send traffic for the site they support through it. That means that you can’t use the VPN to get a US IP address to buy things from Newegg, Apple.com or Google Play. Perhaps Unblock-US can consider supporting those sites for their SmartVPN!