Clarifying Clearwire

At work, we recently had an interesting little adventure with Clearwire. We had a client who had an emergency need for a high speed network connection, and I had some familiarity with Clearwire because I helped some friends set up Clearwire in their restaurant so they could offer free WiFi to their patrons. So I recommended it as a solution to this urgent if temporary need.

We jumped through all the hoops to get this confirmed and set up as swiftly as possible. One of the questions we were sure to ask when we were working with the sales folks was very strait forward: are you doing any blocking or filtering on any ports, specifically ports 25 and 80?

No. We don’t do any of that.

Ok.

Until we had trouble with the mail not flowing, which way?, in. But, we gave the benefit of the doubt. We checked our server settings and our firewall settings to ensure that the changes we had made to connect to this new ISP and modem were not causing any problems. Still, very curious that mail suddenly should not flow out. Maybe we should call Clearwire? We called them up and explained the problem. We asked once again if they were doing any port filtering, especially on port 25. Again we were told absolutely not. The problem magically went away during this period and so we shrugged and went back to more pressing problems.

Until we had trouble with the mail not flowing, which way?, in. Yeah, I typed that again. Because it happened again. So now we really dig in. Investigate everything. Call in psychics and run a séance. Again we call Clearwire and are again told that they don’t do anything of the sort. But we push harder this time and get escalated until we find someone who tells us (can you guess?):

Oh, yeah, we by default filter on ports 25 and 80.

By default. That means for everyone. They were able to open port 25 for us and this fixed the problem.

Let me recap. We asked thrice. They denied thrice. Then when we had them pushed back against the wall they conceded and relented.

Port 80 they do not open for anyone.  Or so I am told.

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One thought on “Clarifying Clearwire

  1. The blocking of port 80 could be significant if you are trying to connect a Mac to an Exchange server using Entourage. Entourage is basically a highly specialized browser through which a connection is made from Entourage to the Outlook Web Access (OWA) portion of the Exchange server. I haven’t tested this through Clearwire but I suspect it will be a problem.

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