Determine if your ISP is blocking or changing your connection?

mykro28

Hi,

Found this on New Scientist,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18938-revealing-the-secrets-of-the-internets-gatekeepers.html

The University of Berkeley are undertaking a study to determine if ISPs are blocking traffic and what kind of traffic they are blocking. You can test your connection with their java applet here,

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/index.html

It takes about 5 to 8 mins and gives a pretty detailed report at the end.
Interesting stuff...
Maybe we could share our results in a thread and shame the ISPs in to submission ;-)???

cbr900

Just done the test online and here are some screen shots of the results,Kaspersky also flagged a warning during the test,I dont think its anything to worry about though

watty

Important to note:

Firewall SW on your PC will affect results.

An external NAT/Router/Firewall with sensible security will affect results.

It's really really good if Ports 135, 139 and 445 are blocked by your ISP (Only used by Windows LAN applications) as there is NO good reason to have them on interent and probably over 90% of network vulnerability on Windows is via these ports

Digiweb only block those

Direct TCP access to remote RPC servers (port 135) is blocked.
Direct TCP access to remote NetBIOS servers (port 139) is blocked.
Direct TCP access to remote SMB servers (port 445) is blocked

You can share the "permalink" in results ONLY if you don't mind people knowing your IP

My upstream buffering is large (about 600ms). There are several places this could be:

• My own XP Network stack (XP pro SP3, built in 100/10 LAN on AMD64 based PC)
• My Network Switches
• The x86 based OpenWRT Kamakaze Router configuration
• The Cable Modem
• The Virtual channel mechanism chosen for upstream TDMA on my DOCSIS connection
• The Basestation CMTS
• Edge Router in Digiweb
• INEX or other connection between Digiweb and ICSI

I obviously could connect direct to Modem to eliminate some of these, also run test on Linux on the 1G ethernet PC.

Everything else checks out Perfect on Digiweb Metro. As the tests point out the blocking of ports 135, 139 and 445 is a good thing for security and affects nothing you would want to do on internet.

Buffering Test

What if this test reports a problem: A problem in this test means your network can't "Walk and chew gum" at the same time. You can conduct large file transfers (such as using file sharing programs), or you can perform interactive tasks (like websurfing or VoIP calls) without the buffer being a problem.

The problem occurs if you try to do both types of activity at the same time: if you try to run file transfers concurrent with other activity, the other activity will feel very "slow", as the file transfer fills up the large buffer, adding latency to all other traffic.

In that our VOIP is perfect and affects nothing and you don't notice here if other people are uploading or downloading and Network gaming on one PC is perfect while other people are doing other things, I'd suspect the Uploading buffer size is the XP TCP/IP configuration on this PC rather than the ISP.

Everything else is Green


Typical Latency 20ms to 25ms, Min Busy time Speed 7.4Mbps down 0.8Mbps up

Digiweb Metro: 8Mbps/1Mbps package with rolling 30 Gbyte cap.