Fed Up With True - Information Please

[Temp]

Like a lot of other people I have come to be fed up with True. An alternative of course when you become fed up with someone is to get the particular service delivered from someone else. This does not really fix the problem though unless a large number of people does the same thing and the original problem will remain unfixed for those unable to change or not technically smart enough to ask the right questions about why application x does not work with their Internet access. So I have come to the conclusion that it is better to try to start to expose the kind of problems people are experiencing with True and stay with them and just keep demanding a normal Internet access. True is so big in Thailand that if they are allowed to run everything their way chances are that smaller ISPs will follow suit and implement their service in just as bad way as True. It is even possible to become affected by True even though you subscribe to another company because it is so big and packets might have to travel through their networks even though you are not their customer(correct me if I am wrong on this last one but it should be common sense I think, not backed up).

The main problem: It appears that I am behind a True firewall and I am being routed via two private network IPs, 10.169.60.1 and 192.168.1.1. They have already done two other BIG no-nos in the recent past when it comes to configuring an ISP network, namely blocking ping and traceroute. It gets a bit technical if explaining but blocking ping and blocking traceroute and assigning private network IPs to routers that handle traffic to and from Internet is a very very bad idea. It simply breaks the way Internet was designed to operate. They have since stopped blocking traceroute and ping it appears but I still get results from online portscans indicating that I am firewalled and my route to Internet still includes IPs reserved for private networks. Now it is not possible to use just any online portscan for this because of the way the network is configured. Almost every portscan out there will only see the IP of the firewall or proxy. The online portscanner at www.grc.com however is able to see the IP assigned to my local machine. The extremely funny thing about the results from the portscan is that they are different every single time. By that I mean that all ports except a few that all people are likely to use, like 21, 80 and 119 are constantly changing their status from simply closed to stealthed. A stealthed port is a port that does not give any indication of it's or the machines presence on the Internet when you probe it. Explained in layman terms it works ok to surf the web but trying to use any other software like servers, P2P, groupware and such really sucks. Now which explanations from True are correct(My guess none):

1. We have a firewall but we are not blocking anything.

2. We do not have a firewall.

3. We block tracert and ping because we want to protect our network and users from viruses.

4. Having the End-To-End ATM ping test from your modem fail is perfectly normal.

Of course I made the big mistake when reporting this issue to True of reporting two problems at once. I also reported the problem about blocked subdomains at yahoo.com and altavista.com. Thus they have of course concentrated on this issue and not the issue of the firewalling that I believe they are very reluctant to do anything about. The problem with yahoo is also funny though. Now there appears only to be a block if you use the True proxy. The really funny thing is that if connecting directly and searching for something at www.altavista.com you will get a redirect page the first time that redirects you to www.yahoo.com. ROFL. My guess is that it happens whenever the searchpage is not in their cache but I am not really interested. They should fix it. They did of course during our discussions try to blame the issue on most parties other than True. MICT, Altavista, Yahoo, the user and so on were all possible sources for the redirect page, but they were still "checking".

The major ISP in a +66 million people country should not be allowed to continue to operate like this. I am very curious as to wether this applies to all True hispeed Internet subscribers and if it applies to other ISPs and other packages. I hope therefore that different people can respond and say the following:

1. What kind of package you have with which ISP.

2. Your apprx. location.

3. If you can run tracert and ping to foreign domains.

4. If you also get mostly stealthed ports when scanning at www.grc.com The test you are looking for is called Shields UP!. After the intro you have to scroll down to select it again and then on the next page click "Proceed". After this you can run test on "All service ports" Is it the same every time? Are the ports stealthed as they appeart to be from my location? You have to disable your own firewall of course in order to know if it is you or True that are doing the blocking.

5. Do you have any strange problems running P2P apps or groupware that requires specific ports to be controlled by the communicating machines?

Your information and input will be greatly appreciated. I have also registered a subdomain at www.bravehost.com that I and others through me can use to publish facts about problems that exists with the True network that they refuse to correct. This site can be found at true-lies.bravehost.com but I have not presented anything there yet.

Cheers

Temp