Which ISP's block VPN by default

My company is ramping up work from home due to social distancing.

Could people advise what ISP's block VPN by default due to their parental control tools etc?

I have found Virgin block VPN due to Web Safe. Anyone else?

When you say VPN are you sure you do not meant Remote Desktop/Teamviewer some ISP do block these (can be removed on request) reason for block being that scammers get people to install these and use them to take control of PC to carry out their scam

I'm on BT with their protection turned on and can confirm Cisco VPN works fine.

I used to be a Plusnet customer and while their protection doesn't block VPN, they have an IP range which used to be registered in the US and can cause VPN issues if you are unlucky enough to get an IP from that range.

No this is a secure tunnelled VPN client we use on their laptops when out and about.

In reply to a post by mikel543:

they have an IP range which used to be registered in the US and can cause VPN issues if you are unlucky enough to get an IP from that range

It still is registered in the US, "BT America" with a Californian address. I don't think ARIN assigned addresses are allowed to have a UK address, otherwise they would have done it by now.

wolvesmad

You should have asked which allow VPNs as well so you end up with a VPN list and a No-VPN list.

BT uses VPNs for most of it's Homeworkers so no problems.

So SKY and TalkTalk, BT allow use of home VPN service. I have not heard from my company of any that do not allow the "corporate" vpn service to allow working from home.


So. Just use it.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

In reply to a post by mikel543:

they have an IP range which used to be registered in the US and can cause VPN issues if you are unlucky enough to get an IP from that range

It still is registered in the US, "BT America" with a Californian address. I don't think ARIN assigned addresses are allowed to have a UK address, otherwise they would have done it by now.

You do find some ARIN blocks with UK addresses when the service is based in that RIR region. You can also find the opposite which is what they're doing with some of the old Infonet/BTA blocks.

There is an increasing number of blocks that were assigned by ARIN moving to the RIPE service region (and others), although you have to wonder if that is because of the fixed fees RIPE now have instead of paying $4,000 a year to ARIN for a /16.

Now that v4 is exhausted, the RIRs don't seem to care as much with the plentiful supply of v6.

Matt

As I said, Virgin Media block VPN using the Web Safe tool.

Plusnet also.

I need to know which ISP's with these parental control shields block VPN.

So end users can't 'just use it' because it won't connect due to these shields being enabled by default.

Edited by wolvesmad (Thu 19-Mar-20 20:17:32)

I know EE and BT allow VPN even with the parental control shields on. I've been on both recently.

The other big ISP's our staff use are Sky and TT.

Edited by wolvesmad (Thu 19-Mar-20 20:17:58)

So I have used zen, sky, talk talk,bt. One of my friends is using Plusnet. No experience of virgin, Vodafone

In reply to a post by uno:

You do find some ARIN blocks with UK addresses when the service is based in that RIR region.

I wonder why Plusnet never bothered, e.g. with this one: https://search.arin.net/rdap/?query=150.143.0.0 (although they did update the abuse contact, for whatever that's worth)

There was a lot of kerfuffle back in the day sorting out their ARIN-based addresses for UK Geolocation, you'd think they'd have done this during that.

ARIN blocks are a bit different to RIPE. The latter you can set "country:" which a lot of databases updated against fairly quickly. This is block specific and can be set down to a single IP. Same for APNIC, they use RIPEs backend so the format is the same.

ARIN blocks only have POCs and ORGs so some of it was guess work which is why they caused most issues and that would generally be assigned to all blocks of that entity.

Matt

Interesting, I did notice that the ARIN result format had no fixed field for country, that certainly does muddy the waters a bit when trying to tie an IP address to a country.

ISPs block VPNs by different techniques, With port and IP address blocking being the most common. ISPs can search for block the IP addresses known to belong to a certain VPN company. To disable connection ports that are mostly associated with VPN traffic.

Plusnet certainly don't block VPNs by default - you need to enable the highest firewall setting to block a VPN.

In reply to a post by azajali43:

ISPs block VPNs by different techniques, With port and IP address blocking being the most common. ISPs can search for block the IP addresses known to belong to a certain VPN company. To disable connection ports that are mostly associated with VPN traffic.

This is WRONG in the UK.

I have been using home working VPNs, of 4 different types for 20 years, across about 10 or 15 ISPs.

There are different types of technology used to implement VPNs, some use TLS (formerly known as SSL) and appear to be a secure web site. Others use IPsec, some use IPsec encapsulated, and then there are OpenVPN and the really new WireGuard. That is just a few.

If there is a problem with a VPN, it is likely to be down to limitations of home routers. In most cases turn OFF any router supplied VPN services, or any "helpers" for VPN.

Which VPN you use?

In reply to a post by GeorginaNorth:

Which VPN you use?

Strange question - primarily the one my employer provides.

You might be thinking of VPN from the "hide my IP" concept, sold by Nord, Express, and others. These are not for home working.

Think a lot of people do not understand what a VPN is or for.

Just built a pfSense Firewall/ router and we have two EE 'Singnal Box' for our mobile phone signal and I had to open some ports on pfSense to let the EE box's VPN to connect.

In reply to a post by APTMAN:

Think a lot of people do not understand what a VPN is or for.

Yes.

Just built a pfSense Firewall/ router and we have two EE 'Singnal Box' for our mobile phone signal and I had to open some ports on pfSense to let the EE box's VPN to connect.

Amazing you've still got them, as others have stopped providing now Wifi calling exists. However those femto cells are often hard to get through firewalls, as they create their own IPsec VPN, which is not NAT friendly, and the telco doesn't want to tell you how it works... We had end of trouble with the Vodafone equivalent, gave up and ended up putting them on a BT ADSL line in the office.

Not strange if the plan is to post some spam later.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not strange if the plan is to post some spam later.

Now I see the newbie tag and posting count !

Post deleted by MrSaffron

Edited by deleted (Fri 28-Aug-20 16:42:18)

Spam be gone