I’m certainly not anti-technology; I am however, a tiny little bit anti making-an-app-just-for-the-sake-of-it. Or making an app because you want a portal on which you can serve me ads or gain access to my contacts by stealth. Yeah, I hate those!
Sky broadband UK: they offer a good enough service, no complaints with them on that front. Their new-ish router, the SR213 is good-looking and has a decent wi-fi range. My only gripe with Sky is that for port forwarding, I need to do it via the Sky app! What the actual f***?
The admin page at 192.168.0.1 is missing port forwarding, DMZ and some parental controls. I really don’t get the logic behind that one. I can’t picture some parent sitting in a coffee shop somewhere taking selfies who suddenly thinks: “Ooh, I should do a port forward, tweak my DMZ and check my parental control status!”
Sigh! I had to download the Sky app and nope! It had no port forwarding in it. So I rang customer services.
10/10 for them - I was through to an actual human (remember those?) inside of 5 minutes. The guy did ask me why I need to port forward and I told him “I want to use BitTorrent” to which he replied “Oh!” and that was the end of that conversation!
Long story short, I’m not 100% sure if this has happened to only me (I joined Sky in Feb 2025) so might be a new thing. But he told me that I needed to wait a couple of hours after installing the app “to allow the settings to propagate”. Hmm! Sounds legit!
But yes, after a few hours, the port forwarding was available in the app and remains available to this day.
This whole arrangement is very strange! Forgive my analytical mind which over-thinks everything but why the need to jump through loops to access port forwarding? There are legitimate uses for this: some games work better with port forwarding enabled and yes, there is BitTorrent which I, of course, use for strictly legal purposes. (Someone reading this is surely (hopefully) saying: “Sounds legit” right about now)!
Is Sky — as THE major broadcaster in the UK of live sports, latest movies and TV episodes — trying to limit the ability of say, torrent users on its broadband network? Because that’s one thing port forwarding is good for, albeit only the seeding part. A BitTorrent user can still download at top-speed without port forwarding; they just can’t upload very well due to incoming connections requiring an open port.
No! I don’t think that’s it. It might be something else like, you know, let’s protect the stupid end user and so let’s lock this thing down tight. Maybe. After all, the router is a domestic one and it is very likely that 99%+ of their customers don’t give two ounces about port forwarding like I do.
Still, what an absurdly strange thing to do.