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August 22, 2005
Port Blocking in London: No SIP Today
I just ran the FWD Utility netcheck.exe and discovered that Port 5060 is being blocked in my hotel room…which explains why I’m having some trouble connecting to SIP service providers. While I’ve heard of cases where hotels were engaging in Port Blocking, this is the first time in my travels that I have experienced this myself.
While I am able to run both Skype and SlingPlayer, I am not able to connect to a variety of SIP networks that expect port 5060 to be open and not blocked.
One day, when selecting a hotel for business travel, besides knowing whether or not the hotel offers broadband internet access, it would be great to know whether or not the hotel ISP subscribes to “Net Freedoms.” While I’m not sure if it is the deliberate policy of the hotel ISP, or just ignorance, regardless, at the moment, port 5060 is blocked in my room. If I was staying in London for more than a couple of nights I would look to move to a hotel that didn’t block port 5060.
What I don’t know is why the hotel would go to the trouble of blocking port 5060? Does this hotel really think they are losing revenue from people using SIP for long distance phone calls? I would think that most guests use their cell phones and not the hotel telephone system for outgoing calls.
I have to wonder if once this hotel discovers Slingmedia whether they would knowingly block access to the default port used by a SlingPlayer to connect to a SlingBox to encourage guests to purchase in-room pay-per-view movies? Where does one draw the line with their Port Blocking policy?
We should all have the freedom to run the applications of our own choosing when we access the Internet – whether at home or on the road.
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Posted by jeff on August 22, 2005 10:43 AM | Permalink
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Comments
HI.. Can i just set up a nine VoIp softphone numbers in one network connected to a single router..Is there any issues when they will simultaneosly place a call.? my dsl speed is 2 mb .Is there any special router in order to set up the Voip softphone ..
Posted by: dhens at March 31, 2006 03:03 AM
Where are u staying?
Posted by: Porto at August 22, 2005 04:27 PM
Or the Hotel is running a large, symmetric corporate-type NAT/firewall with generally draconian blocking of UDP. It's probably not targeting SIP at all (most soft/hard SIP phones can map SIP to another port).
Posted by: Randell Jesup at August 22, 2005 02:45 PM
Such measures are easy to defeat for the technical apt traveler. Establish a VPN link to your office and route your traffic over this link.
Posted by: Tyler Durden at August 22, 2005 02:02 PM
Jeff, perhaps you should try to meet the sys admin who is responsible for setting up the block on port 5060, because if he/she did it with the intent of restricting SIP usage -- and did so of their own initiative -- then that sharpie is in the wrong job and needs to be brought into the IP Communications fold!
"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." (The Godfather, Part II)
Posted by: K² at August 22, 2005 12:21 PM