Belgacom is the former monopolist State owned telephone company in Belgium, and they still have a big part of the market, especially of ADSL internet connections. And although the logos of Skype and Belgacom have almost the same color, I don't think they love each other.
I got a very disturbing e-mail this morning. I translate it from Dutch:
"Dear customer,
To provide your internet connection with the most optimal protection against viruses, hackers, etc. Belgacom takes continuously a lot of protective actions. Therefore, from Monday November 30 on, we implement a major protection intervention on our network: TCP-ports 80, 23 and 443 will be closed for all external traffic towards your network (incoming sessions …)
If you use your internet connection simply to surf or to mail, then you will not notice anything and you don’t need to continue to read.
Only some very specific applications (like web servers) will not work anymore."
And then they give instruction how to unblock the ports!
(The red marked text above is their "marking").
So, will my Skype still work? Technical people know that Skype uses the ports 80 and 443. I am curious, and am awaiting Monday 30 to see what happens. I’ll give feedback for sure.
And of course, there is a workaround, but …
[Feedback November 30: it still works!]
7 comments:
Yes, Skype will work.
Hello valuable anonymous Skype Staff: until now you are right! I called "echo123" and it worked fine!
443 and 80 are "Skype alternative ports". You can disable them and it still will work. Skype will use a different port for primary communication. In order to make my Skype phones and Skype for Windows harmonize with each other, I even had to disable using alternative ports:
See my post here.
I hope it gives a bit of extra info! :)
Thanks Jörg :-)
@Jean: you are welcome :)
Yes it works:-) Those ports are actually closed by operators so that their customers won't be able to offer services in an inexpensive way.
To prevent inexpensive services offered by their customers ISPs like Belgacom block the low port range (<1024) typically used for services when they offer so called public IP addresses - the ones that could be reached from outside.
Das Kapital...
So, if you want to offer services (i.e. run a business) you should pay more...
The old explanation was that IP addresses are running out (IPv4) which is true ... to some extent...
My guess is that even after world has moved to IPv6 this goes still on... because they are just greedy...
let's see if I manage to send this...
br,
timo :-)
jajajaja I don't why but I remember now a funny situation that happen to me some time ago, I was talking with a good friend, and sudden other person enter in our conversation, until today I don't know what happen in tha moment.
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