The Jeff Pulver Blog: BT Broadband WAS NOT Blocking UDP Port 5060!

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October 30, 2004

BT Broadband WAS NOT Blocking UDP Port 5060!

After searching for 36 hours, as best as I can tell, it was NOT and is NOT the current or past policy of BT Broadband to block SIP traffic on UDP port 5060.

While I was pinged by friends on Wednesday to share the story about BT Blocking port 5060, given the fact that today I help run what is the world's largest open IP Communications Network - Free World Dialup - I had thought that we would have been amongst the first people to hear about the situation.

We weren't.

After reaching out to our customers and customers of other SIP networks in the UK, all I could find were people who are using BT Broadband without any problems connecting to FWD.

It turns out that a few months ago a few (or more) BT Broadband customers may have been given end user equipment that was using default configurations which may have been misconfigured at the factory and when installed blocked local inbound traffic on UDP port 5060. The point here is that it is NOT the public policy of BT Broadband to block UDP port 5060 and this was just an isolated case of bad configuration(s) of end-user equipment.

In the future, should broadband ISPs decide to block port 5060 or some other ports and we have emails from their customers complaining about this, I will blog the complaint letters.

I hope that this never has to happen...but I'm certain one day it will...and we will be here to blog it.

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Posted by jeff on October 30, 2004 07:16 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Jeff, while it's great news that BT isn't blocking VoIP at the network level, the router was provided by BT and came configured to block VoIP and to do so surreptitiously (i.e. it was not a user-settable option).

I would wager that this could effect a significant number of BT DSL customers and none of us may be the wiser. Users may have tried a VoIP service and simply cancelled or returned the product. Real users are much more likely to do that and assume the VoIP service is broken or defective than blame BT or struggle to work with BT to resolve the matter (recall that BT offered the customer no support and never even admited to the problem).

Such users would not show up in your poll of FWD users since these users never got FWD to work and simply moved on, silently, assuming FWD was broken.

So I'm very happy BT isn't blocking VoIP at the network, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of BT DSL susbcribers that have been turned away from VoIP as a result of the default BT router behavior and we just haven't heard from them.

Posted by: MrBlog at November 8, 2004 03:40 PM

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Posted by: online poker at November 7, 2004 04:04 PM

I have an SMC Barricade (7004VBR v.2) and in older versions, it regarded connection attempts on 5060 as unauthorised. Once I forwarded the port it was okay. I have a 1.05 (beta) firmware now, and it’s all cool, without any need for forwarding.

Posted by: Ralesk Ne’vennoyx at October 30, 2004 02:08 PM