
T-Mobile, please fix your gateways - akumen
http://en.blog.viclone.com/t-mobile-usa-fix-gateways/
======
cnvogel
The original poster in the linked-to T-Mobile customer forum should really
have spelled out the problem and most important clearly reproducible test-
cases.

Are people really expecting customer-support-representatives that normally
deal with "my facebook doesn't post on my android-iphone" problems to decipher
"It's such is routing of web cache that your DNS has.", "I've tried to use the
phone as hotspot and connect via pc and iPad and didn't works."

(1) I think the problem was not unambiguously described.

I _think_ that the user "rbianco" tried to convey that ICMP/ping and TCP
connections to ports other than 80 worked quite well, only on port 80 was a
connection redirected to a misbehaving/broken (not-so-)transparent proxy.

(2) The methods used to determine these facts, and to reproduce the observed
problems were not described (or rather: information spread over several
messages).

Some other user gave hints how to reproduce the behaviour with different
invokations of curl, this, and maybe even a prepared test-file on the
webserver for the support-staff to play with, would have been most useful.

~~~
peterwwillis
A lot of mobile providers have shitty transparent proxies on port 80 and
ignore problems unless it affects a large customer base in a visible way. They
often barf on any fuzzing of a protocol, such as using LF instead of CRLF in
HTTP requests (which causes more than one provider to actually skip its
authentication checks and allow any request)

~~~
eli
Even when working as designed, they are often doing things like lossy
recompression of your images. That's probably a helpful bandwidth saver for
some people, but I'd prefer you just serve me the site I requested, thanks.

------
cdr
I recently gave Tmobile a try and they've made me regret it immensely. Every
single customer-facing part of their web services (activation, account
management, etc) is riddled with pants-on-fire bugs, and their phone support
is terrible.

When I tried to activate my new account online, I got to a form for payment
that was demanding I fill out fields that didn't exist on the page. This is
insane from a major carrier. I then had to call in to activate, and after
having me on hold for half an hour, they made me verify with one of those
things where they want to know a nearby intersection from where you lived six
years ago - which of course I couldn't answer. I hung up on that guy, called
again, and they let me verify my card through my bank. And now that I had an
account, I tried checking out their account management site, and it was so
broken as to be nigh unusable. And then I found out like the OP that a
noticeable amount of sites are broken or just plain unreachable on their
network.

I now understand why they can offer such a great-sounding plan for $30/month.

~~~
cvburgess
I've actually had really good experiences with T-Mo support. They have
different tiers of "support" but if you get past what is essentially the
"weed-out" tier, they are _by far_ the nicest and most helpful telco support
staff I've worked with.

I came from AT&T and can't compare T-Mo to much else. Do any of the telcos
have what you would consider to be _fantastic_ support?

~~~
cdr
Entirely possible I've just been unlucky. I should have maybe tried
escalating. Virgin Mobile's service was good to me and their website at least
worked even if it was simple, and Verizion was pleasant if overly expensive.

But when Tmobile forces me to call, which I was trying to avoid, because their
web engineering is so completely terrible, and then I have to wait on hold for
half an hour, and then the cust service guy acts like I'm a criminal when I'm
going through all this pain to give them money - a saner person would've given
up.

------
surfsurge
I had a similar issue with T-Mobile and bogon filtering of 5.0.0.0/8:

[http://www.wordsforreading.com/blog/2012/07/19/let-bogons-
be...](http://www.wordsforreading.com/blog/2012/07/19/let-bogons-be-bygones-t-
mobile-filters-address-range-used-by-hetzner/)

~~~
0x0
That's crazy. Why isn't this a 5 minute fix that should be deployed
"yesterday" already?!

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Because they probably have tons of endpoints on the 5.0.0.0/8 range. BT does
the same in the UK for their router management interfaces, just no a slightly
different range.

~~~
0x0
That makes sense in a way. Wow, sucks to be them to have built their whole
infrastructure on stolen IP addresses.

I wonder how their businesses would cope if for example facebook relocated to
the 5.x.x.x range legitimately.

------
rb2k_
Seems like t-mobile has problems with routing to that data center / network
segment ?!

Doing a little research on some internal tooling, I found an IP close to
www.viclone.com (5.135.96.195), namely gemclotures.com (5.135.96.102) that is
also unreachable over t-mobile's 4g connection (tried it myself).

They're both hosted by OVH.

~~~
akumen
Thanks. I am sure there quite a few IPs in that range probably belongs to OVH.
I think the problem is on T-Mobile's end as some of the other people
complaining about 504s were not hosted on OVH.

------
benburleson
For the life of me, I cannot get an automatic monthly payment set up with
T-Mobile. But at $30/month I'll continue to live with it!

~~~
dmdeller
I have the $30/5GB plan, and couldn't get auto payment to work via the web
site after several tries. Finally I resorted to calling 611. Whatever the
customer service agent did to my account finally made it stick.

Most large companies simply have no way to escalate a real bug report.

~~~
selimthegrim
Are they still offering this plan?

~~~
ac29
Yes: [http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans](http://prepaid-
phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans)

Only 100 mins talk time though, so its not for everyone.

------
rbianco2
I hope everybody understand our deception. We were in front an investor
showing our amazing solution and we found that anything from our servers was
reachable. We couldn't make the demo, also We couldn't show the product in the
pitch. We thought ours servers crash or something... Very bad experience. From
that moment past almost 3 weeks and still it's not working.

We contacted OVH, we have the private cloud there, they checked everything
with our team. They couldn't find anything. Then I asked to other T-Mobile
users and saw that the problem only occurs under T-Mobile networks... We were
very very clear in the post, but the few responses of solutions were like "did
you read my problem?"

------
aaronchriscohen
I just went to viclone.com on my Nexus 5 via Tmobile LTE and it connected
fine....
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/c5s5pw4ydohhr4g/Screenshot_2014-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/c5s5pw4ydohhr4g/Screenshot_2014-01-31-12-46-04.png)

~~~
unsignedint
It might be because Nexus 5 is configured to connect through their IPv6
routing. (Not that viclone.com seems to have AAAA record, but it's looking
like all traffic are routed through T-mobile's 6to4 so it might make a
difference, too.)

~~~
p1mrx
It's a NAT64. 6to4 is for tunneling IPv6 packets over an IPv4 network.

~~~
unsignedint
Thanks for the correction. Those do get mixed up in my mind...

