ahhh! a techie that knows something!

[btb103]

umm this is a quote i got from an e-mail a techie from my sucky isp sent me, i don't have a clue what he's talking about can someone translate this into english for me?
:) :)
All of our modems are provisioned for 10MB downstream and 2MB upstream but you will never reach 10MB - the most I have ever seen is 810Kbytes/sec. So at most, it will be 160x faster than 56k dialup.

We do use rfc1918 reserved addresses on our network, but we do not filter them all through a single outside address (PAT, or MASQ). We have a pool of real addresses that get assigned as needed via our firewall which performs the NAT. You can request a static translation and it will be assigned for free. We do block a vast majority of ports below 1024, but hey, you have 2MB upstream, if we didnt block those ports we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.
:) :)

[redxii1234]

10,000,000bps connection downstream, also means download, can be 160 times faster than regualr 56K and transfer rates can be up to 810 KiloBytes(KB) per second.

[tomsykes]

The speeds are self explanatory. I think the main emphasis of his email was the Address Translation (AT) which is used on their network.

RFC number 1918 simply specified the 'private' IP ranges, and they are 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12. Your provider would use one or more of these ranges (most likely 10.*).

You are most likely dynamically assigned an IP Address which is visible to the external world from what's known as a NAT Pool. This means your PC doesn't actually have a globally visible IP Address, but their network performs an address translation to make it look like you do. This won't affect your service functionality (contrary to popular belief).

You certainly have a strange ISP, given they filter ports. You don't live in China do you? :) Apparently they are real tight with their privacy/censorship stuff over there :)

[MosDef112]

Nah.. Blocked ports = no ability to run popular public servers unless you do port maps at your firewall, thus you can get 2MB upstream from your provider without them worrying about network performance degradation. Censorship is the last thing they worry about unless someone sues.