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.