> On Sun, 20 May 2001, Robert Davies wrote:
>
> > PS. One curiosity, if you dail slightly the wrong number 0800, sometimes
> > something called vpop answers, and it seems to connect you with a
different
> > prompt to the usual ntlworld one. As you still need a user/pass I don't
see
> > any practical use for this...
>
> It's most likely to be answered by a dialup stack, which is looking to
> authenticate using a different protocol.
>
> Perhaps used internally with ntlworld, or something ?
>
> Will it let you log in ?
Yeah it did, it was a similar POP, as usual but the greeting wasn't
customised.
I know from having visited NTL's centre, and their server room, that they
use special hardware which handles PPP calls. They said that it puts
packets either direct to the net, or onto the customer ISP involved
depending on what makes sense. I've learned to take what NTL say with a
pinch of salt, unless you can actually check this. They seem to use very
basic static routing at layer 3, and depend on fallbacks built into the
underlying circuits to provide resiliency.
Last time I had a reason to look only a few companies were doing BGP peering
through NTL, so I don't think the service could have proved too popular,
probably as NTL have enough trouble running their own network, and keeping
themselves 'visible' to outside at the NTL corp level. It used to be due to
streaming radio/video that whenever a football match was on, that NTL's
links to outside would be swamped, and everything would really crawl!
Rob
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