Category: Service Providers

All things related to Internet Service Providers

TalkTalk or more precisely lack of TalkTalk

For once TalkTalk got something right. They said they’d respond to my email and they did. Right on the 7th day. Their response was less than satisfying. Dear Mr Crook Thank you for contacting the TalkTalk Business Technical Support team. We have investigated the request below, unfortunately the service which you are currently configured with… Continue reading TalkTalk or more precisely lack of TalkTalk

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Email to TalkTalk (2011/07/01)

In an attempt to clarify my requirements, I’ve emailed TalkTalk customer services. Sometimes these things are clearer in writing: Account Number: xxxxxxxx [Address scrubbed] Hi, On the 29th June, you transferred my broadband service from Nildram to TalkTalk. I was led to understand that this was just a change to my phone line rental rather… Continue reading Email to TalkTalk (2011/07/01)

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Categorized as TalkTalk

TalkTalk Business woes

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by TalkTalk with regard to transferring my telephone line rental to them. As they already provided my Internet (as a result of their taking over Nildram), it seemed like a sensible move, especially as the price was attractive. On the 30th June I received a letter advising… Continue reading TalkTalk Business woes

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Categorized as TalkTalk

Nildram Technical Support

For the first time in ages today I had cause to contact Nildram‘s Customer Support. First I tried to email support@nildram.net which has always worked in the past. It now bounces with: 554 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown Next I tried customercare@nildram.net and this one worked. I even got a reply, all be it,… Continue reading Nildram Technical Support

Broadband Performance

I’m not usually one to rate my ISP on bandwidth performance, there are other more significant factors for me, such as tolerance of the trivial abuse complaints against users of my services. Today however I am rather concerned that my 8192/832kb/s Nildram service is running miserably slowly. According to www.speedtest.net I’m getting about 432/640kb/s. Yes… Continue reading Broadband Performance

Different Views

I got some interesting feedback from “Try” to my LayeredTech ranting. Try holds exactly the opposite point of view to me, in that I think Layered Technologies are too heavy handed in their handling of abuse whilst Try feels they don’t do enough. In http://hotpot.se/guest-book-spammers.htm Try highlights two address ranges that are the source of… Continue reading Different Views

Basic Broadband

There must be a lot of people out there like me who want nothing more from their broadband provider than a reliable Internet connection. I don’t need game servers, email, news and the plethora of other services ISP’s offer to entice new customers into their fold. For the last few years I’ve been running with… Continue reading Basic Broadband

Last Rites

Today has been a long time coming, but the inevitable happened in the end; Layered Technologies shut me down. It started off with just the usual abuse complaint. This time it seems that someone used Tor to run code stored as a phony JPEG at freeimagehosting.net. The complainant had already fixed their vulnerability by the… Continue reading Last Rites

LayeredTech shut me down

It’s finally happened, LayeredTech have disconnected my server. They did this because I failed to respond in 12 hours to an email they sent me at 2334 last night. Like I sit up all night waiting for LayeredTech to contact me! Below is the content of the shutdown message: To: Server ID: Base IP: NOTE… Continue reading LayeredTech shut me down

Hosting Hunting

Recent events with Layered Technologies lead me to thinking that I must start hunting around for a dedicated server hosting outside of the United States. They are effectively the hub of the Internet in terms of bandwidth availability which makes them the ideal and most cost-effective locale. Unfortunately the legal culture is so tied up… Continue reading Hosting Hunting

DMCA Takedown Notice

When it comes to Tor, BitTorrent is a pain in the arse. The idea of BitTorrent is to distribute the overhead of Internet downloading across a wide number of machines. Unfortunately a lot of the usage for it is illegal content which makes Tor very attractive for hiding who does the downloading. This has two… Continue reading DMCA Takedown Notice

Layered Technologies

Layered Technologies are a hosting company in Texas. Their prices are certainly competitive for low-end servers with up to a capacity of 1000GB/month throughput. This makes them ideal for hosting a Tor service, which is what I did after checking with them that Tor was an acceptable service to run. That was in May of… Continue reading Layered Technologies