• Home
• About BTA
• Services
• Contact
• Support
• Webmail

RUN YOUR BUSINESS,
NOT YOUR IT

Please note that this policy is obsolete from 1st December 2009, but remains here for information. There is now no inbound port-blocking employed on BTA Broadband (DSL) lines. Thank you.

For security reasons, we block all incoming connections—coming from the Internet to the BTA network and clients—at our network edge for all TCP/IP protocols and services not destined for known servers. This significantly helps to enhance the security of both our own and our clients' network servers. All BTA Internet Services clients automatically benefit from this protection.

However, this means that, by default, users or locations outside the BTA network outside connect to servers or devices within the BTA network (including BTA hosted servers or systems on client broadband or leased lines, etc) without access to that server or device being specifically permitted on our edge firewall systems.

DEFAULT INBOUND BLOCKED (CLOSED) PORTS

The main ports blocked inbound by default include:

• Web browsing : HTTP (TCP port 80) and HTTPS (aka SSL, TCP port 443)
• E-mail : SMTP (TCP port 25)
• TELNET (TCP port 23) and SSH (TCP port 22)
• All Microsoft Windows networking ports (e.g. TCP 135, 137-139, 445 etc)
• All remote management/remote control ports (e.g. RDP, PC Anywhere, Timbuktu, VNC, SNMP etc)
• Database server ports (e.g. MS SQL Server, MySQL, etc)
• All 'high' ports (e.g. non-standard assigned ports over 1024)

This list is by no means exhaustive.

Note: All Virtual Private Network (VPN) ports are OPEN by default (PPTP, IPSEC/IKE, GRE, etc).

OBTAINING ACCESS TO PORTS/SERVERS

If you are a BTA Internet Services client and require direct in-bound access from the Internet (i.e. from another ISP) to, for example, an internal web server on your office network please contact supportdesk@bta.com with details and we will enable inbound access for you to your server's IP address for the required protocol(s).

Please note that you are then entirely responsible for external security and access to that server/port(s)—if you are unsure of the consequences of these, please consult with our support team.

Thank you.