My parents have signed their ISP souls away to BT and we've been lumbered with a BT homehub all in one box which caters for our wireless internet and telephone so it can't be replaced with a standard router. I've been fiddling with the port forwarding on this brick for days and for some reason I'm still getting firewalled in emule and utorrent, Counter strike source is suffering massively too. Its as if the ports I specify just get ignored by the router. Has anyone had experience with one of these things? Is it a design floor or am I missing something obvious?
Cant help you with the port forwarding but my missus got one of them, nothing but hassle. They also refuse to work with Linux with out some major hacking - even if using the network cable. Kinda ironic considering it runs on a Linux kernel.
BT are also trying to encourage homehub users to 'allow' access from outside in order to create a UK wide wireless network for anyone on the road etc. You can simply stop, find a wireless hub and jump on! A research agency commissioned to look into the security side of it threw the proposal out suggesting it was open to all sorts of abuse, plus the BT homehub is apparently not the most secure of devices. I'd imagine they'll trial it out, so pre-warn your parents to be very wary of any 'offers' BT call them about. ;-)
All well and good, but how would they then monitor your usage? as don't BT still have monthly limits? so theoretically if you let others (unknowingly to a point) use your wireless connection, would that count towards your monthly usage? Of course the other implication is that if someone uses your connection to download movies/music/games etc. then if it was ever flagged by a movie company/music label, then you could technically be sued/fined by them for content that you didn't download, but was linked to your IP i could be way off on this, and please correct me if i am. but personally i don't like the idea of that On saying all that, im on virgin anyways, so doesnt affect me at all
BT do have monthly limits, my family have been charged excessively for exceeding a very small limit (around 10GB a month). We pay for an 'unlimited' connection but due to the age and strain on our line we get capped to a maximum of 12kbps during the day and it only gets released to 5mb between 12 and 6am, and again due to our poor line they've moved the monthly ('unsaid but in the T&Cs') limit down to around 10Gb per month rather than the 40gb it should be and charged us alot of times for going over...without telling us. I argued that this is bullshit and we won't stand for it, but apparently there is nothing they can do and that its capped this way so that everyone in the neighbourhood gets a fair amount of bandwith...I told them I hate my neighbours and I couldn't give a fuck and threatened to take my business else where...they said that they wouldn't try to stop me....knowing full well that I can't because they own the goddamn lines. As for the port forwarding issue, I'm specifying my IP address and the TCP and UDP ports I want to use (I tend to use ports 600-700 as they're used for nothing else) and yet I'm still getting no direct access, it doesn't help that my IP gets assigned differently everytime I boot, and any attempt to create a fixed IP causes the router to crash and deny wireless access to anybody. This is getting incredibly frustrating, all online gaming is completely impossible, my Counterstrike Source ping sits at 158 permanently which gets me kicked out of my regular servers immediately.
Didds, read my post again and you'll see that I am completely opposed to it too for the very same reasons. ;-)
BT tried flogging us one of these because our BT broadband contract is about 4 yrs old and they wanted us to switch to a newer tarriff. I told them to "do one" and me and my cheap little Ozenda router have been fine. In fact moving house recently we now get 4Mbit - absolute lightning compared to my old 512Kbit! Tell your parents to stuff BT Total Broadband - waste of time IMO.
Well after alot of screaming and shouting they finally fixed it all. And to top it off we also have the BT vision TV setup which I have to say, is awesome, 1080p upscaling of all channels(which looks good) and a huge choice of streaming content. As for the net connection, hit 7Mbps now however I still can't get a P2P program through the router, torrenting and gaming works fine.
You can unbundle your line at alot of exchanges. Although some people don't like doing this because BT are actually quite good for voice calls. I live so far from an exchange, I can only get 1mb/s. I can get cable though, I've been tempted a few times by the 30mb/s
www.portforward.com Don't forget ,some ISPs will block particular ports, especially default P2P ports.
