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It's not VPN, it's AlwaysHome

It's not VPN, it's AlwaysHome

It's not VPN, it's AlwaysHome

It's not VPN, it's AlwaysHome

It's not VPN, it's AlwaysHome

Remotely access in-home network and streaming services from anywhere you go

Remotely access in-home network and streaming services from anywhere you go

Remotely access in-home network and streaming services from anywhere you go

Remotely access in-home network and streaming services from anywhere you go

Homing Systems
Homing Systems
Homing Systems
Homing Systems
5 Campaigns |
Burtonsville, United States
$489,077 USD by 3,033 backers
$77,665 USD by 479 backers on Nov 21, 2017
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Highlights
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Overview
For expats and frequent international travelers, AlwaysHome is the best solution for easy, secure and fast access to your streaming subscriptions like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Xfinity from anywhere in the world. It's a great gift idea for friends or family who miss their favorite streaming shows while living abroad or traveling on the road.

What Is AlwaysHome

 

Are you an expat and streaming lover? Do you own a Firestick or Apple TV? Are you a modern cord cutter? AlwaysHome is the right tool for you to take your streaming subscriptions to anywhere you go in the world. It connects your streaming devices like Phone, Computer, Firestick, Apple TV or even Smart TV to streaming subscriptions such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon from anywhere in the world.

With a home proxy set up at home, you can access the in-home network from anywhere you go and access in-home streamings from Xfinity, Spectrum, Verizon TV, etc.

 

Connect all your Wi-Fi devices with AlwaysHome companion dongle

 

If you have a streaming device like Apple TV or Xbox that need to connect to streaming subscriptions, you can use AlwaysHome companion dongle. The dongle is a customized mini Wi-Fi router that is plug & play and portable. It is super easy to use, just connect it to network and wait for its four lights turned on, then you have a new Wi-Fi hotspot in the room. Then connect your Wi-Fi enabled streaming devices like Apple TV, PS4, Xbox, Phone, Tablet, Computer etc to it and then open up your favorite streaming Apps on those devices to enjoy your favorite shows from anywhere in the world. 

 

Connect devices using AlwaysHome App

 

If you travel light or prefer to do everything from computer/phone/ipad, AlwaysHome App all you need. The App is designed to connect your mobile devices to subscriptions without using the dongle. On your devices, just download, run and click to connect AlwaysHome App and then go ahead to open the streaming Apps to enjoy your favorite shows from anywhere in the world. It is that simple. This App runs on Android, Windows, iOS, Mac and Fire OS. (AlwaysHome App can not be installed on some devices such as Apple TV, Roku, Xbox etc, for those devices, a dongle is necessary

 

It's not VPN, it is AlwaysHome

 

For people used or heard about VPN in the past, AlwaysHome runs different software stack and protocols that can connect to a residential place, rather than a data center server that VPNs or Smart DNS connect to. AlwaysHome users actually have a residential IP address when they access any websites. On the other hand, data center based VPNs are normally using IP addresses that allocated to businesses which makes them easier to be identified. You can google around “Why Do Some Websites Block VPNs?“ for more background information on why and how VPNs can get blocked by streaming sites.

AlwaysHome runs through a home network

VPN normally runs through a data center server

 

Compare with VPN and Smart DNS

 

 

Streaming Acceleration

 

When accessing streaming services from far away, AlwaysHome is 3-10 times faster than normal VPN and enables you to watch videos in full HD quality. For curious hearts, the technology we implemented is called WAN optimization, which has been widely used by a large company to connect their global offices and branches. 

The technology is good for applications other than streaming as well. Through AlwaysHome, you get a faster email, research, collaboration, and pretty much faster everything, 

 

 


Set up my own home proxy

 

As shown in the following diagram, you can set up a home proxy right within your home, for your own use. When at out of the home, you can connect back through this proxy device to access in-home network devices (such as IP camera, printer, computers, etc) or streaming services, just like accessing them from home, even you are physically far away from home.

You can use a dongle as the home proxy or your own devices like Firestick or Android TV box, as long as you can install AlwaysHome App on it.

Because the home proxy is on your home network, your access to the internet will have your home IP address and to any website, the access is right from your home. 

 

How to buy AlwaysHome on Indiegogo

 

You can find the perk(s) that fit your needs and then buy it. If you need multiple perks, just buy and pay for each one of them. Then we will set up the right configuration for you. If you purchase a dongle, we will preconfigure it as well and then ship it out. You will receive an email notification when things are shipped out. When receiving your order, it should take no more than a few minutes to get everything started, most of the time, it should be just plug&play.  If not, please contact our support@homingsystems and describe in detail the symptom. 

 

Perk 1

Perk 2

Perk 3

 

AlwaysHome Is Easy to Set Up

 

AlwaysHome is designed for average people who don't have much technical background. The system is very easy to set up. When you receive your order, the device(s) and account(s) are already preconfigured and tested working. All you need to do is plug and play. We also put up some instructional videos on our support website at www.homingsystems.com/support for your reference. Apps can also be download from links on the support page. As an example, here is a quick video to set up the Solo pack. There are videos for other perks on our support page.

 

Please note: If you receive the order and can not make it work in 20 minutes, it is likely you have missed some basis, so please contact our support@homingsystems.com to get things sorted out. Please provide as much detail as possible the steps taking and any symptoms you observed (screenshot or short video would be great information for us to quickly troubleshoot).

 

 

AlwaysHome Dongle Design

 

 

Dongle can be used at home or places with Wi-Fi

 

 

 

What AlwaysHome Is Not

 

AlwaysHome is NOT a replacement to your basic Internet service. The AlwaysHome runs on top of the Internet. So you can NOT use AlwaysHome at places that do not have basic Internet services such as home broadband (Fiber, DSL, etc), WiFi or 4G/3G. 

AlwaysHome is NOT a replacement to streaming subscriptions such as Netflix membership.

 

 

 

 

Since 2015 when we first launch the previous version in Kickstarter, AlwaysHome has been used by a few thousands of happy customers in many parts of the world such as US, Germany, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, UAE, Saudi, South Africa, and Egypt.  We are happy to see a small idea turned into a well-designed product and makes an impact on people's normal life. We truly believe the AlwaysHome products have been and will revolutionize the way people experience surfing the internet while traveling. 
 

What Are in The Package

Once you buy our product, a single share on your Facebook profile or Twitter would definitely help this amazing piece of gadget reach another enthusiastic. Please note: in the package, the adapter is US style and optional. You can use your own regular charger if this US style does not fit well in your country. 

 

 

New Questions During Campaign

1) Why you have different shipping dates for perks and they are from the past?

The original campaign started in Sept 2017, products were shipped out since Oct 2017. Now we are in the in-demand status and people can still get special deals here on Indiegogo. We have sold out some perks (some for multiple times) and we have put them back. That's why the shipping dates vary. Because the products are in stock, the shipping dates are always in the past when you look at it. 

2) I am an expat, I want to access US Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video, but I don't have family or friends that can host the home proxy for me, can you or your company host it for me?

Because the home proxy has to be in a residence which makes it infeasible for us to host it for multiple users. You need to have a residential place to set up the home proxy in your home country. Nowadays, many people already have devices like Amazon Fire Stick at home, so just ask them to install and run the AlwaysHome App for you. There is also a feature coming up this month that will prevent your access to their internal network devices (only websites through their the home network) so they don't need to worry about security issues this may cause.

3) I am not a technical guy and still a bit confused about the user license, could you explain more?

We don't charge the use of the home proxy. We charge a subscription to each remote App account that is used to connect to the home proxy. We also charge a subscription to each remote dongle that is connected to the home proxy.

For example, David travels to Asia from time to time. He wants to keep watching US version of Netflix, Hulu and Xfinity show when he travels. He set up a home dongle at his New York home and then installed AlwaysHome Mobile on his Mac computer. In Asia, he opens Mac computer, starts the App and then watches all the shows he wants just like at home. For David, he needs to buy a dongle hardware and then pay for a subscription license for App account to run on his Mac.

Another example, John lives in Dubai with his family. He set up one home dongle at Florida home and then at Dubai home, he set up a remote dongle for his Apple TV and other devices to connect back to Florida home. His daughter would be able to watch streaming shows just like at Florida home. For this, he pays for the home dongle hardware and the remote dongle hardware and one subscription license for the remote dongle to run. He then purchased another subscription license for his App so he can use it on his iPhone/iPad when he is out of Dubai home. 

Campaign

1) None of the perks meet my needs, I need a customized configuration. So what should I do?

You can claim multiple perks from our campaign. Order dongle and user license separately from different perks and combine them to meet your need. When adding dongle, use the perk that reads like "add extra dongle (no shipping cost)" in together with your other perk. This extra dongle perk has to be ordered when you have other otherwise there is no shipping address in the system so we never know it needs to be shipped.

2) Can you ship on time? I want it as a holiday gift for my family, it’s important for it to get it before the holidays.

Yes. The campaign is now in in-demand and we normally ship within 1-2 business days after receiving your order. When you see your order is in "lock" state, that means we are processing your order to be shipped out. If you only order subscription license, we will setup things and email you the details so you can start using the service right away.

3) 3-10 times faster internet, multiple device connectivity, space shifting revolution; seems too good to believe! Is this for real?

We have come to the 3rd major release of our product and thousands of users have been using it ever since its advent in 2015 for the first time. Along the way, we solved quite some challenging problems so our stuff is not just an idea that just sprouted out of the box.

Although every user is different with the internet infrastructure he is using, 3-10 times faster is a norm and observed by our customers especially those in Asia, Africa, and Mid East.  

We offer the best price with the features untouched yet. That’s why we brought a software update which allows you to use your phone, tablet or streaming box as space shifted streaming device even without the dongle. Yes, it is real. Time to believe. 

4) How do you compare your pricing with VPNs?

First of all, no VPN service out there can do what our solution can do. They normally get blocked by streaming service providers (a good search of "Netflix block VPN" will reveal the fact). We price the service in the lower end to mid range of all good VPNs. We are able to do so because our software is more efficient and cost less hardware resource to run. Also, our solution can leverage your home network bandwidth that you already have, that will reduce the number of servers we need to set up.

5) I know networking, could you elaborate on how you measured network performance to support your acceleration claim?

Measuring real-time network acceleration is just a piece of cake. We use mainly speedtest.net for this task. You can go to the platform and start to measure the download and upload speed of your network connection and compare it after connecting to the network with AlwaysHome.  And the results will look as just as ours. We have proven results from our customers around the world. 

Note: the performance is subjected to ISP policy regarding bandwidth shaping, physical network bandwidth limit etc. Those are physical factors that AlwaysHome may not solve. However, almost all the ISP’s networks, we've tested have rendered the 3-10 network acceleration.

Features

1) If the home proxy is down, can my remote devices fall to a server and access the blocked websites?

Yes. You log in to the web portal with your account and configure your devices or dongle to use our servers deployed in US/UK/Korea/German etc. Or you can email us and let us know the home proxy is down and we will manually switch your App/dongle to connect to our servers within a few hours. Connecting to our server will NOT get Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video who are aggressively blocking access from public servers, including many VPNs and our servers as well. Connecting to our server will get you to Google, Facebook, YouTube etc which are blocked in some countries.

2) How many users can the dongle support simultaneously?

When using the dongle as the home proxy, we suggest limiting the CONCURRENT remote devices up to 5. When using the dongle as a remote device, technically there is no limit of devices that can be connected to it simultaneously. But we suggest not to surpass the number more than 10.  Please keep in mind that the bandwidth will be shared among all users. If you are using your own devices such as Amazon Fire Stick as the home proxy, we believe it can support more than 100 devices.

3) I have an old phone, can I turn it into a home proxy?

Yes, it needs to be Android 4.4 or above, or iOS 10 or above. You need to make sure the AlwaysHome App keeps running all the time. That means you need to open the App and leave the screen saver off that the phone OS won't kill it even it is idling.  

4) Between remote device and home proxy, is the communication going via the Homing cloud or directly between them? If it's the latter, how do communications traverse firewalls without port forwarding being set up? 

It is mostly the latter. Remote device and home proxy all connect to Homing Cloud and they will be instructed to start a process called NAT traversal which enables a direct communication without port forwarding. In most of the cases, NAT traversal can work successfully. From then on, user data will be exchanged between these two directly. In some rare cases, NAT traversal does not work and a direct link is not possible. Then a middle server doing the piggyback will be utilized so the communication between the two dongles will go through our mid server. 

5) What makes AlwaysHome stand out from the other VPNs in the market?

VPNs are good under certain conditions. But they typically become hard to manage when the user count goes up. VPNs are designed for data encryption. When the user count goes high with its popularity, they become slower & interrupted especially when the user can choose which server to get on. AlwaysHome is a cloud-based distributed server infrastructure that supports fault tolerance and great scalability to handle a large number of concurrent users.

VPNs are using standard protocols like PPTP,L2TP,OpenVPN which can be easily identified by “middleboxes” such as firewall or proxy or routers with DPI (deep packet inspection) capabilities. Those boxes can easily block VPNs once identified. AlwaysHome, however, employs proprietary protocols that are not known to middleboxes. It means AlwaysHome does not suffer the blockage that VPNs are subject to.

VPNs were designed to be a security solution, never meant to accelerate network performance. AlwaysHome, on the other hand, has a technology called WAN optimization. This technology can significantly accelerate network speed over a long distance on the Internet.

So, if you are a VPN user and still think that it’s one of the precious technologies in the 21st century, you definitely want to check out AlwaysHome.

6) The dongle seems nicely designed. Can I use it at a coffee shop or hotel where there is no cable around and sometimes the captive authentication is needed?

Yes, dongle support to use public Wi-Fi for the Internet to connect itself to and at the same time provide downlink Wi-Fi to attached devices. You can attach a phone/computer to the dongle and then login dongle’s web management interface and configure the dongle to use a surrounding Wi-Fi hotspot. It also supports those Wi-Fi hotspots using so-called “captive authentication” that requires one to agree on terms, input a code etc. before using the Wi-Fi.

7) Does AlwaysHome support PPTP/L2TP or OpenVPN?

No. The data protocols are proprietary and developed by the AlwaysHome developers.

8) Technically, the dongle acts as VPN or proxy?

Technically speaking, AlwaysHome is not VPN but rather a TCP proxy service, with network acceleration capability. It is not HTTP proxy though.

9) I am worried that someone can access my home network through the home proxy. How can you guarantee security?

That’s a valid concern and we have addressed it deeply. All devices including home proxy are all behind a firewall and do NOT require you to open a port on your home router for port forward function. So your home proxy and home network are still protected just like your other devices at home. Accessing home proxy can only be done through a valid and configured dongle or App that requires valid user login.

Accessing of in-home devices can be disabled if you want to share your home proxy with friends so that they can access streaming websites, but not your home network devices, like your PC or NAS.

10) How stable is your system? Will there be network interruptions as other VPNs?

Our system is based on a cloud-based distributed server infrastructure which has high fault tolerance and scalability. Unlike VPN, which is normally point to point, in our system, the finding and switching to a working server is done automatically against a pool of servers. So the whole system works more reliably than VPN.

11) If I have an Android TV, can I connect it to the dongle and access content from out of my home country?

Yes, you need to install the App on your TV. So, as long as the Android TV has access to Google Play TV (AlwaysHome App is in Google Play) or you know how to install an APK manually onto your TV, you can watch your home country shows without geo-restrictions.

Shipping

1) To which countries do you ship?

We ship globally excluding the following which has been flagged by courier services as restricted or high risk: Belarus, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, North Korea, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria & Zimbabwe. If you would like a shipment to any of these countries we will make alternative arrangements that may cost more, however, we cannot guarantee the shipment's arrival.

2) How will my order be shipped?

We have already mass produced the dongle. So once you buy a perk, your order will be processed within 2-3 days and then shipped out. For US backers, it’s expected to be delivered within 3-4 days using USPS First Class (there will be an email from stamps.com with all the tracking number etc).

For Non-US backers, products will be shipped out from China factory directly. We normally employ one of the express companies, DHL/FedEx etc and you normally receive the delivery within a week after shipping. On occasions post service is used for some hard to reach areas or countries, please expect 2-3 weeks or even longer delivery time.

It is very important to have your correct address and phone number on file. We had a couple of returns which are very high cost because of the incorrect address info.

3) Do I have to pay European VAT / GST?

Yes, the amount will depend on your country’s regulations. Only the dongle needs shipping though.

4) How can I be a distribution partner or reseller of AlwaysHome?

We'd love to hear from you! Please contact:  contact@homingsystems.com

We are also open for custom requests for leveraging our technology core and platform for your business goals.

Refund policy

AlwaysHome complies with Indiegogo refund policy. You can cancel the backing before the order is processed (status turned to be LOCKED). In general, there is NO refund after the products have been shipped. 

If you bought the product by mistake, you can contact AlwaysHome customer satisfaction team through support@homingsystems.com. We normally ask you to return the product and then issue the refund. Please bear in mind that we will need to deduct the fees and charges that we already paid from the total refund. 

Warranty & Support

AlwaysHome hardware including accessories comes with a one-year limited warranty. Contact our customer satisfaction team via support@homingsystems.com for faster response.

Shipping Policy

International shipments may be subject to import taxes, customs duties, and fees levied by the destination country. We don't have control over these charges and you will be responsible for fulfilling them. When customs clearance procedures are required, it can cause a delay beyond our delivery estimate.

It is also the recipient's responsibility for charges such as change of address, parcel holding, return fees caused by the recipient. So please make sure you have the correct address information including a phone number on file.

Got something which is not answered above? No worries! Send us a message or email contact@homingsystems.com.

 

By contributing now, you’ll no longer be tied down to a particular location for work, or to catch your favorite shows or sites.  Travel without worries, and experience your content wherever you are, just like you are Always Home. The AlwaysHome also makes a great conversation starter on those long international flights and layovers!

If you can share AlwaysHome with your friends, family or anyone who you think our product will be a huge leap in their lives especially to make it easier to live and work anywhere in the world, it will be a great support for us and for them too. So don't keep it a secret, let them see the game changer!

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Companion App & 3 Year Sub
featured

Companion App & 3 Year Sub

$119 USD $207 USD (42% off)
Estimated Shipping
Original: December 2018
Current: March 2019
43 out of 1000 of claimed
Add Your Own Home Proxy Dongle

Add Your Own Home Proxy Dongle

$29 USD $49 USD (40% off)
Estimated Shipping
March 2019
55 out of 100 of claimed
Companion Dongle - 3 Year Sub

Companion Dongle - 3 Year Sub

$159 USD $265 USD (40% off)
Estimated Shipping
Original: February 2019
Current: March 2019
59 out of 1000 of claimed
Ships worldwide.
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