Dear Mr ISP...

[deannawol]

I've had nothing but trouble with my ISP for the past couple of days. As most people on my friends list know, I use AIM rather a lot. However, after no problems using it on Dial-Up over the weekend, I get back to my broadband connection and ... it won't work. Nothing has changed, just the connection type. But... Did a scan of available ports for it to connect over and got connected over the SSH port, 22. Now, this was all grand until this morning. When even that wouldn't work... Decided to uninstall my firewall to see if that was interfering with anything but nope. Still nothing. This is getting annoying.

Torrent ports, Peer to Peer ports haven't worked since November which is rather annoying. Now chat and secure ports don't seem to work. This is getting ridiculous. Anyone know of a program that I can download and use to find out blocked ports?

*curses to the ISP*

Comments

[bastun-ie.livejournal.com]

This might be a stupid question, but have you tried calling them?

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

Tried emailing them. Don't wanna call them until I have my computer in front of me. So it's a matter of getting home before they close for the evening.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Who is your ISP?

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

Clearwire Broadband...

[oduinn.livejournal.com]

You are circumspectly screwed.

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

Oh? Care to elaborate on that or should I just accept it?

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I was almost certain that was going to be your answer. They now appear to be shipping a particularly restricted version of the Internet that is of no use to anyone who doesn't just use email and web.

They will apparently unblock ports on request, if you can tell them which ports you want to use, although from what I've heard so far I'm not sure their helpdesk staff know what a port is. But anyway...

Yeah, best option is to contact their support and or customer service and complain.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I've just had a word with a colleague who knows people who work in there (at beyond basic helpdesk level) and he intends to talk to them at some length. Whether this will make any difference or not is another matter, but you never know.

This is a pity. I had recommended them to some people, but their practice of blocking *everything* and then unblocking on request simply does not scale and turns them from an ISP into an SP, not someone I'd ever give money to.

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

*jaw drop*

Seriously?

*jaw drop further*

They are blanket blocking everything barring pop/smtp and http/s access? For the love of... *is speechless*

I thought that the p2p and torrent ports were blocked for traffic issues, that would have made some sense but blanket blocking is rather rediculous, especially as they are being paid for a service.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I may be being unfair to them here, in that I don't think they're blanket banning. But they have blocked far more ports than they needed to. My source suggests that they haven't blocked 22, so if you could check it again that would be appreciated.

And no, just to be explicit, I have no information to suggest that they are *only* leaving 25, 80 and 443 open, not a bit of it, but they are *not* providing what I would describe as the Internet.

[oduinn.livejournal.com]

See, I could have elaborated, but this has saved me all the hassle.

Basically I was going to say this, and then point out that internet capacity in ireland hasn't changed in the last 4 years, while internet users has grown rediculously. This means that capacity is becoming an issue. As sis will tell you (at GREAT length), we've been having problems connecting to certain servers from home, including livejournal. The solution is a simple de-reg/re-reg by your ISP, but getting them to do it is tricky.

Especially when I found out today that our ISP just got bought out, so my influence is gone. :(

Was that disc usefull btw?

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Glad I saved you hassle. :)

But seriously...

You were with Netsource?

As to internet capacity in Ireland, what do you mean when you say that, 'cos I can think of someways it's true and someways it isn't, depending on context, and I'm just wondering if you're thinking what I'm thinking?

[oduinn.livejournal.com]

Still with netsource - they're still in business in their own right. They're just owned by someone else now.

The technical infrastrucute here just isn't up to the load. Eircom's never bothered to upgrade the hardlines and switches etc except in very specific, high-profit geographic areas. Since eircom sublets the lines to everyone, it's a cascading problem.

But that's just my evil two cents. And I'm actually quite liking eircom at the moment, cause they're being good.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Eh, as regards the technical infrastructure, I don't think that's the case. Magent (your new masters) are getting up to 20+Mb over old Eircom copper (the older stuff can be very, very good) and the new ISPs are putting their own kit into Eircom exchanges. In addition to this a *lot* of fibre has gone into the ground recently, really, a lot, put there by county councils, the government, private industry etc. etc. The Eircom backbone is only one of many and while, in most cases, they're still the last mile that is slowly changing.

People are using less and less of Eircom's infrastructure as time goes by and long may it continue.

Now, there isn't a lot more fibre *into* the country than there was a few years ago, but that's a different conversation.

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

I have never been that bothered about speed or contention ratios. All I want is that basic applications work when I open them. If I can get that on dial-up, I'm happy. However, we can't even do something like switch to Eircom because of a problem with our Eircom line.

And no. Loaded it onto the external drive and well... The computer needs to be on for the external drive to turn on so it wasn't picked up. :( I'm starting to think that Daniel will be consigned to a drawer and left there.

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

Well, I can only presume at the moment, mainly because I had AIM connecting through port 22 but now it won't connect. I'll have another look again. And if it was only 25, 80 and 443 open, I'd have problems. *grin* Yahoo SMTP doesn't run through any of those. ^_^

I'm still slightly miffed that they would put any port blocks in place without informing people beforehand. Of course, they still haven't gotten back to me on my email, 48 hours at this stage.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Independent testing by another Clearwire user seems to indicate that 22 still works, certainly for simple SSH.

[deannawol.livejournal.com]

Bashed it about a bit last night when I got home and got it working again. Had to have an actual SSH connection open on the port first. Very odd behaviour but I'll be home tonight before their tech support closes so fingers crossed that they have an engineer or someone that isn't sadly lacking in the field of intelligence on the phonelines.