Access to firewalled ports

It's Tooway and all its resellers, a UK satellite broadband provider. They are very expensive (hundreds of quid for installation, and as much for 5GiB/month as most people would expect to pay for 100+), but if you use them it's because BT in their infinite wisdom have decided you can't get ADSL in your locality (in my parent's case, the exchange is full, and if anyone asks for ADSL they are told to pay the £250,000+ upgrade costs first) and nothing else is available. So the only people using this are a captive market, and Tooway knows it.

They actually work quite well as a service, speed-of-light-induced latency being what it is: the only real problem with them is that ToS and filtering, blocking virtually everything and thus making me feel like I'm breaking some rule whenever I dare log in to work from my parents' house, let alone set up a tunnel so I can do a git pull or some other dark and dire activity like that.

As for where this is called out in their terms of service... well, I can't even *find* the terms of service any more, they're so well hidden: when last I found them several years ago they marked almost everything as FORBIDDEN including things like 'terminal emulation': only HTTP and HTTPS were marked PERMITTED. Note: the things calling themselves terms of service on Tooway's website are for the website, not for the service. For all I know the TOS has changed, in which case this comment is mostly of historical interest. :)

I thought maybe the prohibition was due to bandwidth considerations, given that this is satellite broadband, but they allow iPlayer... so I guess not. Maybe they're caching the hell out of something and don't like things that break it, but even so, the only thing they'd save on is bandwidth to and from their Italian downlink site, not to/from orbit, and to be honest if they can afford to contract with Eutelsat for satellite service they can damn well afford decent bandwidth to their downlink site!

It's not like they can rely on everyone viewing the same thing in iPlayer at the same time: they'll be using limited downlink bandwidth from orbit for every independent viewer. This is not multicast! And terminal service does not strain it, ffs. Certainly not more than all those ack packets for an iPlayer stream (and yes, the acks do flow back, or at least *something* flows back while you're watching iPlayer, so they don't have a special optimization for that case).