Mr. Blog has sorta retracted/corrected his post about BT port blocking of SIP.
Jeff Pulver jumped in and got the facts from Pulver Communicator and FWD users in the UK. When I saw Mr. Blogs post I went to Jeff who is about as in the know as anyone to see if he could help. I’m very concerned about Port Blocking becoming a reality. Pulver cut through the flack and found out it wasn’t really happening. Now Mr. Blog agrees.
He corrected his posts and cleared the air. That’s class.
I think it’s important to note that while it’s great news that BT isn’t blocking VoIP at the network level, the router was provided by BT and came configured to block VoIP and to do so surreptitiously (i.e. it was not a user-settable option).
I would wager that this could effect a significant number of BT DSL customers and none of us may be the wiser. Users may have tried a VoIP service and simply cancelled or returned the product. Real users are much more likely to do that and assume the VoIP service is broken or defective than blame BT or struggle to work with BT to resolve the matter (recall that BT offered the customer no support and never even admited to the problem).
Such users would not show up in Jeff’s poll (the users that never got FWD to work and simply moved on).
So I’m very happy BT isn’t blocking VoIP at the network, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of BT DSL susbcribers that have been turned away from VoIP as a result of the default BT router behavior and we just haven’t heard from them.