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Can't access NowTV

thesynman

Casual Member
Hi all,

Had CF 1GB installed a few days ago. Linksys Velop router. All fine except I can't access NowTV (Sky's budget streaming service). Trying to access www.nowtv.com from a browser gives me:

Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.nowtv.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.5e847b5c.1709971831.9ffeebb8

And the NowTV app on my phone won't work either.

I've reported this to CF but I'm not holding my breath. I assume this isn't a problem affecting all CF customers?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

John
 
Hi all,

Had CF 1GB installed a few days ago. Linksys Velop router. All fine except I can't access NowTV (Sky's budget streaming service). Trying to access www.nowtv.com from a browser gives me:

Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.nowtv.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.5e847b5c.1709971831.9ffeebb8

And the NowTV app on my phone won't work either.

I've reported this to CF but I'm not holding my breath. I assume this isn't a problem affecting all CF customers?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

John
Sounds to me like the IP you are using has been blocked by NowTV's service. If that's the case then this is a NowTV problem not a CF problem. They may be using a DDoS protection service which has outdated IP information and think the IP CF is using is malicious or should be allowed to use their service.

I would suggest to try using a VPN to see if that works around the problem. But this merely confirm that the issue is with the IP your traffic is coming from when it reaches NowTV.

If you are on the 1Gb plan and just had it installed then you are using CGNAT. CGNAT means carrier grade NAT which means you do not get a public IPV4 address, you get a private one and CF does NAT for you. This works in the same exact way as your home ISP router so in effect now you have double NAT to access the internet. This shouldn't be an issue to use NowTV but keep it in mind in case you want to use any services that require port forwarding as these won't work with CGNAT.
 
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I'm blocked from there also with the same message. They block VPN's, Proxies and Hosting providers. They think our IP is one of those.

The same issue with Santander for me, I cannot log in to any account because of the incorrect IP detection they're performing. Both work fine on my Virgin IP though!

The only fix is to contact Sky directly and give them your IP and ISP and the error message. Perhaps they have an email address you can try.
 
I'm blocked from there also with the same message. They block VPN's, Proxies and Hosting providers. They think our IP is one of those.

The same issue with Santander for me, I cannot log in to any account because of the incorrect IP detection they're performing. Both work fine on my Virgin IP though!

The only fix is to contact Sky directly and give them your IP and ISP and the error message. Perhaps they have an email address you can try.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with the problem!

I had a long online chat with someone from NOW who ended up saying I need to contact the ISP to fix the "issues" with my IP. Their view was "if you can access us via a different provider but not CF, then it's CF's problem". I guess I'll have wait to see what CF say about it. :(
 
I'm glad I'm not the only one with the problem!

I had a long online chat with someone from NOW who ended up saying I need to contact the ISP to fix the "issues" with my IP. Their view was "if you can access us via a different provider but not CF, then it's CF's problem". I guess I'll have wait to see what CF say about it. :(
It's not CF's problem, it's clearly NowTV who are blocking the request incorrectly. But CF could solve it if they give you a public IPv4 which they used to do on the 1Gb plan but now they only do on the 3Gb plan. As I said some people had success getting one by threatening to leave CF. But this is something NowTV should fix.
 
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For what it's worth I can get to nowtv.com fine on Community Fibre's CGNAT service.

The address I get as a public IP address (if I chjeck using whats my IP address or similar) is in the range 45.146.8.0 - 45.146.11.255 currently which checks out as a Community Fibre registered range.

I keep a bit of an eye on this and it seems to change every month or two.

The "internal" CGNAT address my router sees (100.xxx.xxx.xxx) doesn't seem to change.

@thesynman

It's probably worth seeing who appears to own the range your public IP address seems to belong to.

If it's Community Fibre, pointing that out to Now TV might get you somewhere.

On the other hand, you might find after a while (some weeks) your public IP address changes and that fixes it.
 
Is there a way to spoof your MAC on the Velop routers? I know you shouldn't have to but that may prompt a reassignment of public IP at the CGNAT level. Not entirely sure this would work and there would be no guarantee that you'd get put into a bucket with a different public IP.
 
Is there a way to spoof your MAC on the Velop routers? I know you shouldn't have to but that may prompt a reassignment of public IP at the CGNAT level. Not entirely sure this would work and there would be no guarantee that you'd get put into a bucket with a different public IP.
That's an interesting thought. But if they only do the linking by MAC address it's trivial to bypass. I owuld imagine the OLT also does a check that the expected MAC address is at the right port. You would need someone to give you a valid CF MAC address to test.
 
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That's an interesting thought. But if they only do the linking by MAC address it's trivial to bypass. I owuld imagine the OLT also does a check that the expected MAC address is at the right port. You would need someone to give you a valid CF MAC address to test.
I guess it depends whether they care about the legitimacy of MACs. I know on the non-CGNAT packages you can give it any old MAC and it'll assign an IP. Change the MAC and IP changes.

I would expect the decision on whether a plan is CGNAT or not has more to do with the ONT configuration and assignment than the IP layer.
 
CF have messed up their IPv4 details on the geolocation database that is used by companies to decide if you are UK based. I am currently having problems with the national lottery website that will not let me log in due to location issues.

You may be able to see the same issue if you remove IPv6 from your PC and then go to https://myiplocation.org/ which is likely to say that it can not find any geolocation info regarding your IPv4 address.

I guess they have purchased another block of addresses and not registered them or deployed them before the registration details have gone live.
 
CF have messed up their IPv4 details on the geolocation database that is used by companies to decide if you are UK based. I am currently having problems with the national lottery website that will not let me log in due to location issues.

You may be able to see the same issue if you remove IPv6 from your PC and then go to https://myiplocation.org/ which is likely to say that it can not find any geolocation info regarding your IPv4 address.

I guess they have purchased another block of addresses and not registered them or deployed them before the registration details have gone live.
This is incorrect. CF does not maintain a geolocation of IPs. This is provided by third parties that want to do sell a geolocation blocking service. The IP registry is updated instantly as IPs need to be owned by you before you can use them. So the problem is the third party providing the geolocation service or the company using the geolocation service not updating their geolocation cached data from the geolocation service. Give me the IP you use and I will prove to you it shows as CF in the registry.
 
This is incorrect. CF does not maintain a geolocation of IPs. This is provided by third parties that want to do sell a geolocation blocking service. The IP registry is updated instantly as IPs need to be owned by you before you can use them. So the problem is the third party providing the geolocation service or the company using the geolocation service not updating their geolocation cached data from the geolocation service. Give me the IP you use and I will prove to you it shows as CF in the registry.
I did not state that CF maintains a database and the databases run by third parties do not all update instantly as you claim. Many provide data dumps that are updated weekly or monthly so that the data set can be used locally by the client and from the statement made by the national lottery they use such a data dump as they make the claim "it may take a few weeks for the changes to take effect".

So any third party using a real-time API-based service may see the fact that the address range has been relocated, but no large-scale internet service is going to make possibly 10's millions of API calls a day if they can instead just load up a data file once a month into their own systems.

Currently, IPligence's data set reports my assigned IP address to San Jose California, while myiplocation.org reports no details.

It is the job of the ISP to sit on any address ranges they purchase for long enough to make sure that this type of issue does not happen.

The only good thing is that CF's CGNAT system seems to reallocate addresses often so this IPV4 address will become someone else's problem in a day or 2.
 
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Currently, IPligence's data set reports my assigned IP address to San Jose California, while myiplocation.org reports no details.
Neither of those sources are the golden source for IP ownership. What’s the IP subnet you are searching for? ie 1.1.1.x
 
For a while old IP location data had my CF IPv4 address as being based in Romania as I presume CF bought the block off a .ro ISP.

I'd hope that Akamai would have up to date data however. IPInfo & MaxMind are two of the main GeoIP data providers.
 
I'd hope that Akamai would have up to date data however. IPInfo & MaxMind are two of the main GeoIP data providers.
Neither IPInfo nor MaxMind are the golden source of IP blocks. IP blocks are registered with the relevant RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) as per ICANN's Global Addressing Policies. You typically start a WHOIS search in your regional RIR which for us is RIPE (Regional Internet Registry for Europe, Middle East and Central Asia). For instance for my public IP subnet this is the query:

https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/query?searchtext=149.34.146.1

In this case it comes as "IPv4 address block not managed by the RIPE NCC" which means it's on another RIR. I usually just try ARIN (Northern America) which is where most of the rest of the IPs are.

So here is the ARIN search:

https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-149-34-128-0-1/pft?s=149.34.146.1

It shows the IP block is a /18 which means it's 16384 IPs which transalates to 149.34.128.0-149.34.191.255. The block is registered to COGENT (which is a US large network provider and ISP) with CF as a customer so all looks good.

@rit I challenge you to search for the IP you see as not being allocated to CF in the relevant RIR WHOIS service. You will find out that is indeed registefred to CF and like I said this is an issue with the GeoLocation services or the companies using their service in that they are not using up-to-date data.

PS: Some of the RIR WHOIS do a traversal query / cache some of the RIR data and can tell where the IP block is registered. For instance the LACNIC (Latin America) tells me my block is on ARIN:

https://query.milacnic.lacnic.net/search?id=149.34.128.1

The other 2 RIRs are:

APNIC (Asia Pacific): https://wq.apnic.net/static/search.html
AFRINIC (Africa): https://www.afrinic.net/whois

For full certaintity it's always best to check in the relevant RIR rather than relaying on information from cached data.
 
It is all well and good there being more reliable IP location databases but unfortunately the ability to access a geo restricted service will depend on which database the service provider has decided to integrate with.

They should eventually catch up but I know from experience that not all geo location services update daily. The one I'm dealing with at a client is weekly.
 
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