You are here: Frontpage / Articles / Why TDC is a bad provider
Author: Carsten Boysen Jensen
9 August 2007
My story of a provider gone bad. If you want to use your ADSL all the way and host your own inexpensive server you are wise not to use this provider.
As the connection of the house up until now was in my name and I
soon move away, we wanted to get the connection over in the name of
the owner of the phoneline. As it was directly possible or at least
unnecessary hard, we chose to use the opportunity to also change
provider. I used Cybercity
and we chose TDC. The phoneline is
also from TDC so we gathered things here.
It also gave me the opportunity to use the router I had laying from the last time I had TDC. It doesn't come with the connection...
It seemed to work. We could access the net and people was coming
in to see the three sites on my server. But something was wrong. I
could send email, but I could not receive. Or I should say, I could
receive emails from TDC Webmail, but not from
Yahoo!, HotMail or others. And the
emails from TDC Webmail was between 20 minutes and 2 hours delayed
where it normally only takes one second from the email is send till
I get it. Yahoo! and HotMail gave the errormessage "Could not
connect to SMTP server". It was clear that something was totally
wrong somewhere. I had never experienced something like this
before. Of course I checked that I hadn't made something wrong. I
didn't think that it was on the outside the problem was. Why should
it? The router was mine and port 25 was open. If you rent a router
at TDC port 25 is closed, as it is written on their homepage. But
it says nothing about that they close it in any other way, so I
assumed it was some of my equipment that made an error. So I bought
a new router, the server used to work and the configuration was as
they should be. It just didn't help. It was a really nice router
from Asus with Gigabit network, but it didn't solve the problem so
I returned it. Now I was almost certain that it was at TDC somethin
abnormal was going on.
Knowing that TDC is hard to dance with, especially if something is wrong, we never the less call their customer care to get an explanation. Somewhere I hoped they could solve the problem, but I didn't count on it. We talked with more than 20 workers at TDC customer care, most of which didn't shit about what we talked about as soon as we mentioned mailserver or just server. One admitted that they closed port 25 "for our own sakes" and that it couldn't be fixed. We even talked with the supervisor. He denied everything. No, they didn't block any ports and if we could go on the net everything was working. Okay, normally that would be the case, but not when you use TDC! Because the definitely block that that port, no matter what that fool says.
The best advice we could get from TDC customer care was to direct all email through their server. But that takes out the hole point of having your own domain, if you have to use a TDC-address for every incoming emails. Because it was their slow Webmail they wanted us to use. This is unacceptable. One of the great things about having your own server is that you can choose a different solution than the one from some provider.
We didn't in any way feel that we had gotten the product we ordered, so we made them close it again. Of course they then told us more lies. Normally it takes them a month to close a connection, but this we didn't want. We couldn't use it for what we wanted to use it for and we wanted, so we made them close it immediately so we could go back to Cybercity where everything was working. Then they said, that there was 6 weeks waitinglist at Cybercity. This was a big fat lie. Because when I later ordered a new connection at Cybercity they told me 7 days. And this was true and everything is working again.
My conclusion must be that if you can live with lies and misinformation then choose TDC. If you besides that only use your ADSL to fetch information etc. then choose TDC. If you on the other hand want to use the freedom you get with ADSL and therefore want your own server, then keep far away from TDC and choose a more mature provider that makes things work and who's customer care actually knows what they are dealing with... Guess who.
Something else is if someone chooses to close some port "for our own sakes" then I call it censorship. And when it's only one way they close, then I call it stupid. If it's to avoid spam then it's the wrong way. It would make more sense to close outgoing as most spammers are on private IPs or use private IPs with or without the owners knowledge - did someone say Windows?
At emails never the less arrived from TDC Webmail with a big delay and not from anywhere else, indicates a very bad boycott of all other services, which they actually shouldn't get away with. But that is not my problem. It can be explained with that it is only from IPs that are not owned by TDC the blocking is done, if they are not part of TDC's "local network".
When TDC went bad I don't know. My best bid is that the moneyfond that bought TDC has drawn so much out and fired so many workers that they no longer can provide a product that you can live with. It has not always been like this. At the time when I switched to GNU/Linux and saw all the nice programs I realiced the possibility to have my own server. At the time I used TDC and I didn't have any problems. But it is long ago and many thing have happend since...
The contents was last modified on 20 May 2009, at 02:21 (CEST)