My Experience of Internet Services in Brazil: Oi

The terminology used on the Oi website was very confusing and the only piece of useful information I could glean from each offer was the download speed and the price. Search as I might, I could find no other details.

On 13 August, I tried the Oi website's chat facility to chat with an expert. I began by saying (roughly trans­lated) that I would like to buy the Oi-Velox 2 Mbps service but that I needed ports 21, 4662, 4665, 4672, 47862 and 57195 open for listening and to please verify that the Oi service does not block these ports. To this, the Oi expert, Evelin Araujo simply responded "OK". In hind-sight, I hope that I wasn't being too rash in assuming that the service would naturally leave all ports open for in-bound packets. Since, after her "OK" she went on to ask my postal code to verify service availability (which I had already done via the Oi web­site), I naturally took her "OK" as a positive answer to my question.

The rest of the chat was, for me, somewhat confusing. It was, in fact, the second chat I had made via the Oi website to try to ascertain the minimum necessary and sufficient information about the service that I would need in order to determine its suitability for my purpose prior to purchasing it. Consequently, the only way to dis­cover this minimum necessary and sufficient information was to buy the service and hope for the best.

I made one last concerted effort, spanning 2 whole days, searching the user com­plaints blogs and those pertaining to users with some degree of technical know­ledge. My most positive discovery was a blog in which a subscriber revealed his painstaking research about the Oi Velox service. He revealed that the following ports were blocked:

Port	TCP	UDP	Res	Emp	Service
21	x		×		FTP (File Transfer Protocol) control
22	x		×		SSH (Secure SHell)
23	x		×		Telnet
25	x		×		SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
53	x	x	×		Domain Name Server
69		x	×	×	TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol)
80	x		×		HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
110	x		×		POP3 (Post Office Protocol Version 3)
111	x	x	×	×	NFS (Unix Network File System)
135	x	x	×	×	INGRES-NET service
137	x	x	×	×	NETBIOS name service
138		x	×	×	NETBIOS datagram service
139	x	x	×	×	NETBIOS session service
143	x		×	×	IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)
161	x		×		SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
443	x		×		HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
445	x	x	×	×	SAMBA (Microsoft's Network File Sharing)
513	x		×	×	who, login
515	x		×	×	printer spooler
1080	x		×	×	Socks
1433	x		×	×	ms-sql-s (Microsoft SQL server)
3128	x		×	×	ndl-aas Archive API server port
3129	x		×	×	netport-id NetPort Discovery port
4444	x		×	×	KRB524, NV Video default
4480	x		×	×	unassigned
6588	x		×	×	unassigned

Res: Oi-Velox Residential Service, Emp: Oi-Velox Business Service.
I cannot imagine why they would want to block two unassigned ports.

Most of the above blocked ports should indeed be blocked from the Internet. This is because most of them are allocated to service dæmons which provide services whose appropriate jurisdiction lies only within the individual computer itself. A few also have appropriate jurisdiction within a local area network. Having these ports open to the Internet could leave both the LAN — and the computers connected to it — rather vulnerable to either accidental or deliberate invasion.

None of the listening ports that I absolutely need to be open, for requests arriving from the Internet, appears in the above table. Port 111 is open within my LAN for the Unix Network File System, but it doesn't need to listen to the outside Internet.

Notwithstanding, I have no option but to assume that the above-listed ports are blocked only for incoming originations (listening) and that they are open for out-going traffic. For instance, I do need Port 25 open for out-going traffic in order to retrieve my email from my email server in the United States, which I have had for almost 15 years and through which just about everybody I have known during that period contacts me.

I now had a simple choice. On the one hand, I could decide not to subscribe to a service about which I could not obtain the minimum necessary and sufficient infor­mation for deciding whether or not it would fulfil my requirements. On the other hand, I could ignore the "buyer beware" adage and just go blindly ahead with the purchase, in the hope that all would be well after the event. Since all the large corp­orate ISPs in Brazil appear to be of the same ilk, the first option would leave me permanently cut off from the Internet. Since most of my work since 1963 has been in computing and telecommunications, involving the Internet and its prede­cessors, I would face a future in limbo. Consequently, going blindly ahead with the purchase was my only practical option.

Oi: Purchase and Installation

Saturday 15 August 2015 AM: I went to the Oi shop at Shopping Cidade in Belo Hor­izonte. A download speed of only 2 Mbps was the maximum Oi could provide, which seemed rather slow for this day and age. I have no idea what the upload speed will be as I could find no such information on the Oi website and nobody with such knowledge was contactable prior to purchase either in the shop or by tele­phone. The Oi Velox 2 Mbps service was scheduled to be installed between 08:00 and 12:00 hrs. on Tuesday 18 August 2015. At 09:35 hrs. on 17 August 2015 I received a telephone call from Vidal Matos of Oi (Protocolo 201542663063) asking if I had been treated appropriately during the purchase. The person who attended in the shop treated me well and conducted the business but had no technical know­ledge whatsoever, nor access to anybody who did.

At 21:40 hrs. on Monday 17 August 2015 I suddenly found a lone PDF file on the Web which gave the download and upload speeds of the Oi Velox service I had pur­chased. These were: download speed: 2 Mbps, upload speed: 512 kbps. But no­thing about whether or not any ports were blocked. In this document I discovered yet an­other piece of significant information which I could not find prior to purchase, de­spite asking. That was that I was allowed only up to a quota of 50 gigabytes (GB) of data traffic (up + down) per month. The old W@Y Internet service had no month­ly quota limit. Notwithstanding, 50 GB seemed way more than adequate for my kind of use.

At 09:30 hrs. on Tuesday 18 August 2015, Oi telephoned saying the installer was en route (Protocolo 20151122145927). At 11:15 hrs. the Oi installer himself phoned to say he was en route. He arrived at my apartment at 12:30 hrs. He disconnected the existing Motorola RF cable modem from the router of my fully working system and connected in its place a D-Link DSL-2500E modem which he had brought.

Name: D-Link Model: DSL-2500E MAC address: B0C554A96CC1 P/N:  ISL2500EZBO6.B1G Serial Number:  QX0L1E1546497 Input: 5V, 1A unsmoothed Hardware: B1 Firmware: OI-V1.11(131106)

My computers were, at that point, unable to access the Internet. He disconnected my computer from my router and connected it directly to the new modem. I was then able to access the Web from the browser on my computer. He said that every­thing was working and that there was a problem with the configuration of my rout­er, which was not his jurisdiction.

Oi: A Sense of Having Been Deceived

I told the technician, before he went, there were 7 functionality tests I wished to conduct in order to prove to myself that everything was working properly and that the listening ports I required were open. I conducted the 7 tests. All tests passed except the last two. Although I had an HTTP server and an FTP server running on the old W@y Internet service (up until about 20 minutes before), I did not expect either of these to work with the new service. I was reluctantly resigned to that in­evitability. I was satisfied because I was seeing high IDs on the eDonkey, Kademlia, Gnutella and G2 services. The installer left.

The Oi installer could not have been gone more than five minutes when the four listening ports for the eDonkey, Kademlia, Gnutella and G2 serv­ices all closed, as if automatically. My computer was now well and truly firewalled!

I had pestered, pestered and pestered prior to purchase for information regarding closed ports. But none had been forthcoming. Consequently, I am highly suspicious that Oi closed the ports on their modem remotely via the TR-069 protocol as soon as they knew the installer had left. I cannot think of any other reason why they should be open when he was here and then close soon after he left. I remained ex­tremely angry about being firewalled after the event in this apparently very under handed manner.

Oi: Listening Ports Test

To double-check the situation, I firstly lowered the firewall on my computer. I then closed, waited two minutes and then re-started the eDonkey, Kademlia, Gnutella and G2 programs. I then used a remote Web-based open port checker to test if those ports could be pinged from the outside world. All four ports timed out with no response. My listening ports were indeed being blocked somewhere between the open port checking service and my computer.

I then tried using a range of alternative listening ports appropriate for each service. Same results. It appeared that all unsolicited incoming packets were being univers­ally blocked. It didn't seem to be just some listening ports being blocked: it seemed to be a case of all listening ports being blocked indiscriminately. Thus the final re­sults of my tests, both for the old W@y Internet service and the new Oi Internet service (which replaced it), were as shown below.

W@y	Oi	Application
Pass	Pass	client HTTP access via Web browser
Pass	Pass	client SMTP/POP3 Email access via Thunderbird
Pass	Pass	client FTP access to my hosted web space
Pass	Fail	High ID access to eDonkey/Kademlia
Pass	Fail	High ID access to Gnutella/G2
Pass	Fail	FTP server
Pass	Fail	HTTP server

I have no way of re-configuring the modem to open the four ports I require. Oi did not provide me with a name and password with which to enter the modem's con­figuration facility. They did not even leave me a user guide, let alone a user man­ual. Besides, I expect that if I were successful in hacking my way in to the modem's configuration facility, Oi would automatically re-close the listening ports concerned by TR-069 remote configuration.

"Based on scans of the Internet Protocol version 4 address space, the 7547 port, which is associated with TR-069, is the second most frequently encountered service port after port 80 (HTTP), ..."
PC World April 10, 2014 6:45 AM

So it would seem that a lot of use is made of TR-069.

Reconfiguring The Router

I reconnected my computer to the router as it had been before changing over to the new Oi Internet service. I connected the router to the D-Link modem, which the technician had installed. I switched on my computer and also another one which was also connected to the LAN. Neither computer was able to access the Internet. I logged in to the router's configuration facility via my computer's web browser. There I noticed that the modem had the same fixed IP address (192.168.1.1) as the router. In this situation they obviously could not communicate.

Not having been given the user name and password of the modem's configuration facility, I could not reconfigure the customer-side address of the modem. To have been able to do this simple thing would have saved me an awful lot of work. I there­fore had to change the base of the router's address space. I changed it to 192.168.2.1. This precipitated quite a large collateral workload. It meant I had to change the fixed IP addresses of all the three main computers on my LAN from 192.168.1.XXX to 192.168.2.XXX. I also had to update these addresses in the NFS, LAN scanner, and LAN printer configuration files and edit the NFS entry in the fstab file, which was no small task.

I also had to clone my computers MAC address into the router because it appeared that the Oi service uses MAC addressing to authenticate a connection. And it reg­isters the MAC address of the first device to be connected to the modem, which was my computer: not the router. After a couple of hours of concentrated effort I mana­ged to get the Oi modem working through the router with all the computers on the LAN. But, of course, all listening ports were still closed.

---

At 16:05 hrs. on 19 Aug 2015 I received a call from Oi about configuring the mod­em. The telephone line was so distorted and the background so noisy that it was difficult for me to make any sense of what was being said, but it seemed the person wanted to know all kinds of bureaucratic details about me. I told the person to call again tomorrow morning when somebody with a far better command of Portuguese would be here, who would be far better able to make sense of what was being said in such circumstances.

At 17:15 on 19 Aug 2015 my Internet connection went down. My browser did not seem to be able to access a DNS. At 18:38 hrs. I decided to try re-booting the modem. It worked. I was back on line. I felt disturbed that the modem had hung like that.

At 10:15 am on Thursday 20 August 2015 I called Oi's technical support service. I was attended by a person called Isaias (protocolo 20151123324432). I asked him why all the listening ports were closed on my service and that I required at least ports 4662, 4665, 4672, 47862, 57195 open. I even explained why I needed the ports to be open. Isaias responded that I already had the maximum velocity avail­able at my premises and that it could not be increased. Clearly he had no idea what I was talking about. He did not even seem to understand what ports were. It seem­ed plain that I was not going to get any meaningful help from Oi. With regard to the problem of closed ports, it seemed, I was well and truly on my own.

At 09:35 hrs. on 24 August 2015 I received a strange telephone call from a woman who first said she was from UOL (Universo Online, a Web content, products and services provider whom I had never contacted). The woman then corrected herself, saying she was from Oi. I asked her for a protocol number. She hung up.

Where Does The Blocking Occur?

The D-Link DSL-2500E modem, as installed by the Oi technician [César] arrived in a box per­taining to a different make and model of modem: a Sagemcom 2704N. No user manual or installation guide of any kind was supplied. I did a little research on the D-Link DSL-2500E modem and discovered that it was referred to as a "Modem-Router". This seemed a bit strange since it has only one RJ11 port on the Internet side and only one RJ45 port on the user side. I surmised that the "router" aspect of this device must be solely concerned with the control of data flow: in other words, it had a firewall. My home installation had thus become as follows.

The only change to my home installation was that the W@y Internet RF modem had been replaced by the Oi modem/router, as shown above. My catastrophic problem with closed ports could therefore only have one or both of two causes:

1. The ISP (Oi) was blocking all listening ports remotely, or
2. The modem/router's firewall was blocking them locally.

In the first case, the blocking would undoubtedly be occurring within the ISP's local Distribution Router (shown as a yellow square in the following diagram). I very much doubt that Internet Backbone Routers (shown as green circles) would engage in any form of port blocking.

If port blocking were effected within the ISP's local Distribution Router, I would expect it to be similar to what is shown in the above Port Blocking Table. I would not expect a local Distribution Router to block all unsolicited incoming IP packets (i.e. to implement the total blocking of listening ports).

The blocking of unsolicited incoming IP packets begs the question as to where (at what point in the network) my monthly traffic quota is measur­ed. Is it measured within the ISP's Modem or the ISP's local Distribution Router? I would expect it to be measured in the Distribution Router. More significantly, do my monthly traffic quota measurements include or excl­ude the blocked unsolicited incoming packets, which of course I do not receive? Am I being effectively charged for the data the ISP is blocking from me contrary to my wishes?

I could do nothing about any blocking which may or may not be taking place within the ISP's local Distribution Router. I could only hope that the blocking was taking place within the DSL-2500E Modem/Router installed at my premises. I therefore de­cided to try to reconfigure the "modem/router" locally.

Trying to Open The Modem's Firewall

Before trying to re-configure the modem's firewall, it is necessary to be certain of exactly who is who regarding IP addresses. The LAN-side address of my router and the LAN addresses of my three computers are all fixed. With the old W@y Internet using the Motorola RF modem, the router's LAN-side address was 192.168.1.1 and the local addresses of my three computers were 192.168.1.100, 192.168.1.102 and 192.168.1.104. The reason for the computer addresses being in steps of 2 (100, 102, 104) is because each computer also had a provisional wireless address (101, 103, 105 respectively). The Oi modem uses the fixed Outer LAN-side address of 192.168.1.1. So I had to change the router's fixed address on the Inner LAN to 192.168.2.1. This required that the 3 computers' addresses had to be changed to 192.168.2.100, 192.168.2.102, 192.168.2.104, as shown in the following diagram.

The addresses shown in green are dynamically-allocated. The router's Outer "LAN" address is allocated dynamically by the modem. However, since the router is the only device to which the modem connects on its "LAN" side, this address is always likely to be the same. It can therefore be regarded as fixed. The modem connects to the ISP's Gateway, which runs within the ISP's Distribution Router. Its address should not vary. The modem's WAN-side IP address is dynamic, being allocated by the ISP's Gateway each time the modem re-connects to the Gateway.

DSL-2500E Modem	192.168.1.1
TP-Link Router	192.168.2.1
My Computer	192.168.2.100
Computer 2	192.168.2.102
Computer 3	192.168.2.104

This arrangement gave me the following sing­le address-space on the customer side (my side) of the DSL-2500E modem, as shown on the right. Other devices should be able to con­nect to my Inner LAN from time to time via dyn­amically allocated IP addresses onwards from 192.168.2.106.

Each device should be able to address any of the other devices within the com­bined Inner and Outer LANs. Thus, I should now be able to address the Oi modem from my computer by entering its address 192.168.1.1 into my browser. It should also mean that, conversely, the Oi modem should be able to "see" my computer as 192.168.2.100.

The technician gave me no instructions on how to use or configure the modem. I was not even supplied with a user-name, a password or the web address for ac­cess­ing the modem's configuration facility. Happily, I discovered that, unlike NET's RCA modem, the Oi D-Link modem/router has a browser-based configuration inter­face. So at 07:00hrs. on Thursday 20 August 2015 I decided to try to re-configure the Oi modem myself.

Hoping that Oi had not changed the ubiquitous factory defaults, I entered the modem's LAN-side IP address 192.168.1.1 into my browser's address field and hit RE­TURN. A dialogue box appeared asking for my user-name and password. I entered the word "admin" for both the user-name and the password, then clicked the OK but­ton. The modem's Status Page appeared as shown on the left. Please click on the image for an enlarged view. I looked next at the LAN-setup page. I did not need to alter anything here. Everything on this page was set up correctly already. It seemed that the "Advanced" tab was the one I needed for opening the listening ports.

With precisely-configured firewalls in my TP-Link router and all 3 computers, all I really wanted to do was simply disable completely the firewall inside the new D-Link modem/router. I just wanted it to pass everything unhindered to my router exactly as W@y Internet's Motorola RF cable modem had done. But of course it was never going to be that simple.

1) Access Control List

The first item on the side menu of the Advanced page is the Access Control List. The instruction at the top of this page reads: "You can specify what services are accessible form LAN or WAN parts. Entries in this ACL table are used to permit certain types of data packets from your local network or Internet network to the Gateway. Using of such access control can be helpful in securing or rest­ricting the Gateway managment." [sic]. This word­ing is, to me, confusing. It is said to be a table of permissions, which is useful to control or restrict.

My best guess from the last sentence quoted above is that this Access Control List is a list of places (computers) from which a person may have control over the re-configuration of the modem. I see that there is already an entry in the table at the bottom for anybody on the WAN (Internet) side of the modem to modify its configuration but none for the LAN (my) side. I therefore set the radio but­ton to enable LAN control, entering an IP address of 0.0.0.0 to signify that any computer on my LAN could be used to re-configure the modem. I was still left confused as to how this entry enabled me to "man­age the Gateway" from the LAN.

The WAN (Internet) side seemed even more prob­lematic. Initially, I found that only pings were per­mitted (accepted by the gateway) from the Inter­net side. I had the option of allowing Web, Telnet, FTP, TFTP, SNMP and ping to pass through the gateway. I ticked them all. But, I wondered, what about other services, which are not on the list, that I may wish to use from the Internet? Am I being forbidden to use them? I am — and remain — be­wildered as to what these entries really mean and what will be their resulting effect.

The next item on the menu is Port Triggering. Setting up server applications to trig­ger a port every so often to keep another listening port open is always problematic. Besides, I would need to know the dwell time for a port remaining open. This is a time interval set somewhere within the gateway, which I have no idea how to find. I therefore decided to leave Port Triggering alone.

2) The DMZ Option

It would appear, in this context, that DMZ stands for "Demilitarized Zone". The in­for­mation note at the top of the form reads:

"A Demilitarized Zone is used to provide Internet services without sacrifi­cing unauthorized access to its local private network. Typically, the DMZ host contains devices accessible to Internet traffic, such as Web (HTTP) servers, FTP servers, SMTP (e-mail) servers and DNS servers."

I wish to serve my essays via aMule, Gnutella and G2. I would like also to make them available via HTTP and FTP, as I did via the old W@y Internet service. How­ever, to do this, I would again need a fixed IP address, which this new service does not pro­vide. Notwithstanding, a DMZ would seem to be what I need to permit Internet users to access my shared files via aMule and Gnutella/G2, with the ability also to use Kademlia to search for the subject matter covered by my essays.

All I had to do was to enter the LAN-side IP address of the demilitarized zone. I am not sure whether I should enter the address of my computer running the servers 192.168. 2.100 or the address of the WAN side of my LAN router 192.168.1.2.

The situation is not at all clear. Arbitrarily, I opted for my computer, since the mod­em should be aware of my computer on the Inner LAN. Notwithstanding, the whole notion of what exactly they mean by a Demilitarized Zone remains a mass of con­fusion. All I want to do is forward the blasted listening ports!

3) IP Port Filtering Options

I selected the Filtering Options item on the Advanced Menu and the page I saw look­ed ominous. The first thing to catch my eye was a two-line section at the top subtit­led DEFAULT ACTION STATUS. The two lines were as follows.

Outgoing Default Action:	◉ Permit	◌ Deny
Incoming Default Action:	◌ Permit	◉ Deny

The big problem with this is that the radio buttons were grey, meaning that I could not alter their settings. To alter these, I suspect that I would have to enter the con­figuration program using some kind of superuser password, which I did not have. I felt at this stage that I had well and truly come up against a brick firewall. It gave me the impression that this setting caused all unsolicited incoming request packets to be blocked by default. And this is 100% consistent with what is actually happen­ing.

Nevertheless, I lived in hope that perhaps the Rule Configuration section below could be made some­how to temper the out and out denial of un­soli­cited incoming packets set in stone by the Default Action Status section above it. The note at the top of this page reads: "Entries in this table are used to restrict certain types of data packets from your local network to Internet through the Gate­way. Use of such filters can be helpful in securing or restrict­ing your local network." I presume that "restrict" refers to the option to deny passage to all unsoli­cited incoming packets, as set by the lower greyed radio button.

I therefore attempted to set up rules to allow through the unsolicited incoming packets which I wanted, namely, all of them. The entry form had radio buttons to permit or deny, which I presume operated in opposition to the way the Default Action radio buttons operated. In other words, I assumed I could create rules which would allow at least part of what was denied by the Default Action radio button for incoming packets. So I set the rule action to "Permit". The next task is to select which direction to "permit": Upstream or Downstream. Does "Downstream" mean "Incoming" and "Upstream" mean "Outgoing", or am I missing something here? To try to make the gateway permit everything both ways, I set up a rule as follows.

Permit everything from my gateway 192.168.1.1
to my computer 192.168.2.100 to travel "Downstream".

I really don't know whether this rule makes sense or not but since I have no way of Permitting incoming packets universally, what else can I do? I strongly suspect that rules entered on this page can only restrict what is universally permitted by the greyed-out radio buttons under the DEFAULT ACTION STATUS sub-heading but can­not be used to permit, in part, what has been universally denied by the greyed-out radio buttons. If this be so, all unsolicited incoming packets will be denied pass­age through the gateway from the Internet to my LAN and there is nothing I can do to change this.

I further suspect that the current settings of the DEFAULT ACTION STATUS radio but­tons was set remotely by Oi engineers via the TR-069 facility as soon as they knew that the installation technician had left my premises.

---

The following menu option was URL block. I have no interest in blocking anything. I simply want to get this confounded gateway open. The next option on the menu is Denial Of Service Settings. Service cannot be denied when it isn't even working yet. So I'll pass this one for now. The next item on the menu is for setting the IPV4 and IPV6 Domain Name Servers. These are already set to automatic, so I'll leave them. The next item was Software Tools. All were disabled and no specific Internet serv­ices were forbidden. The next item is Routing. No static routes were set and I don't need any.

4) NAT Virtual Server

The necessary and sufficient information needed to specify a listening port to be forwarded to a computer on the LAN from the Internet is as follows:

• The name of the relevant server running on my main computer
• The number of the port on which it is listening
• The LAN IP address of the computer on which it is running
• The TCP/IP protocol for which the server is listening

One would rightly assume that the source of the packets being listened for arriving from the modem would come from the WAN interface as specified elsewhere.

The only sub-page under the "Advanced" tab on which I found an in-fill form for this kind of in­formation was the "NAT Virtual Server" form, as shown on the left. At the top of the form was written: "The page allow you to config virtual ser­ver, so others can access the server through the Gateway" [sic]. Please click on the image for an enlarged view.

NAT stands for Network Address Translation. It is a method by which the Internet address of your router (say 201.62.140.93) is translated into the LAN address of your computer (say 192.168.2.100). This makes your LAN computer appear, to computers on the outside Internet, to have your router's Internet address; but only as regards data transactions taking place on particular ports at a particular time.

The wording on the above page assumes a certain context. For instance, am I right in assuming that the "others" are computers in the outside world. That is: not on my LAN but on the external Internet. I shall assume so. I fail to see why I need to specify anything about the WAN interface here as no other option is possible. I can't forward ports from anywhere other than the established Internet connection. Not­withstanding, the form does contain fields for the four essentials listed above.

I therefore entered the details for each of the ports that I needed to forward to the servers on my computer. There was no op­tion for selecting both the TCP and the UPD protocols in a single entry for a single port. It was therefore necessary to make an entry for each port-protocol combination. The en­tries I made are as shown in the screen-shot on the right. I selected the Maintenance tab and committed the changes to the modem's system memory. I rebooted the modem.

I closed and re-started my servers. They were all still well and truly firewalled. Their listening ports could not be seen from the outside world. The modem re-configur­ation that I had done had changed nothing.

5) NAT Forwarding

Of the list of NAT sub-options, the next most likely cause of my LAN being firewalled seemed to be "NAT-forwarding". At the top of the form is written: "Entries in this table allow you to auto­matically redirect common network services to a specific machine behind the NAT firewall. These settings are only necessary if you wish to host some sort of server like a web server or mail server on the private local network behind your Gateway's NAT firewall."

Although it is not unambiguously clear to me, I think this means that this facility allows me to direct requests coming in from the outside world (i.e. emanating from the Internet) to server dæmons running on a particular computer on my LAN. The wording does, however, leave me in doubt as to what is meant by "Local" and what is meant by "Remote" with regard to IP addresses.

The Local IP address could mean that of the computer 192.168.2.100 running the servers on my LAN. After all, it is what I can reasonably think of as a local machine. If so, perhaps the Remote address is that of the gateway 192.168.1.1 in that it effectively represents to computer 192.168.2.100 all the computers out there in Internet land. However, the Remote address could also be the indeterminate addr­ess 0.0.0.0 of all the computers out there in Internet land. On the other hand, "Local" could mean the address of the gateway 192.168.1.1 because it is the machine (within the modem) on which I am entering this information. In this case, the Remote address must be that of computer 192.168.2.100 running the servers on my LAN.

Local	Remote	Accepted?
192.168.2.100	0.0.0.0	NO
192.168.1.1	192.168.2.100	NO
0.0.0.0	192.168.2.100	YES‡
192.168.2.100	192.168.1.1	YES†

Computer 192.168.2.100 must be mentioned. The configuration program accepts 192.168.2.100 as either Local or Remote. If it is Remote then 0.0.0.0 must be Local. This could mean that the gateway (the machine I am messing with) is the local machine representing the indeterminate address of whatever computer out there in Internet land is making the request. On the other hand, if 192.168.2.100 is deemed to be Local, being on the Local Area Network, the Remote address must be 192.168.1.1, that of the gateway. I decided to opt for the latter †. I deleted the top two entries in the table. But try as I might, the configuration program flatly refused to delete the final entry shown in the table. So I deleted the next to last one and opted finally for the third version ‡.

Of course, this confusing situation could have been made crystal clear by using about 50% more properly constructed wording. In the end, I simply had to take a chance. Needless to say, after passing these changes to the modem's system mem­ory and re-booting everything, I was still firewalled.

6) Port Forwarding

Port forwarding is really what I want to do. It is what I have been trying to do all along. It was an utter mystery to me as to why I could not find a Port Forwarding option anywhere within the configuration facility of this modem. However, a little more Internet research eventually revealed why I could not find it. I saw that the generic version of the D-Link DSL-2500E modem configuration had a Port Forward­ing option in its side menu under the Advanced tag, as seen below.

This option was not present in the Oi version of the modem's firmware. Oi had intentionally and deliberately removed the facility for forwarding ports. All were blocked without any means for the user to unblock any. Oi's salespeople had strai­ghtly lied to me about all ports being open. They knew perfectly well that they had all been intentionally and permanently closed.

7) Channel Configuration

My quest all along has been simply to get back what I had before with the old W@y Internet service. In other words, I want what is effectively a dumb modem, which does nothing to the IP packets passing through it. In this case, the IP addresses at the various points in the local network would be as shown below.

The WAN interface of my router would then, as before, have the IP address alloca­ted to it directly by the ISP's Distribution Router's gateway software. The modem's LAN-ward IP address would be the same as it was and would be solely for accessing its configuration facility from a computer on my LAN.

The obvious way to achieve this seemed to me to be to somehow disable the modem's mechanism for translating IP addresses from its WAN-side and its "LAN"-side (between the modem and my rout­er). The mechanism that expedites this translation is the Network Address & Port Trans­lator (NAPT). It seemed sensible that this should be what I need to disable. The only place where I can apparently do this is on the Channel Config­uration, as shown on the right. Please click on the image for a large readable view. I simply had to change NAPT in the table at the bottom from "On" to "Off". I therefore noted all the settings in the bottom table then deleted it. I then entered the same details into the entry fields.

However, before clicking the ADD button to create the new table entry, I unticked the NAPT box, which had been automatically ticked by default. After adding the new table line, I went to the MAINTENANCE page and saved the changes. I then switched everything off — computer, router, modem — for a few minutes. I then powered up from a cold start and left the system for half an hour to give the mo­dem plenty of time to synchronize with the ISP's service.

And guess what: it didn't work. The modem refused simply to pass untranslated IP addresses to my router. I have never, in all the 52 years since I entered the com­puter and telecommunications industry in 1963, had such trouble with configuring a communications device. For this reason, I think that the generic firmware of the modem must have been modified at source and rebuilt (re-compiled) by or at the request of this ISP, to the specific end of ensuring that no unsolicited incoming IP packet can be passed to the LAN-side. Without the source code of the modem's firmware, I can do nothing more.

Sting in The Tail

Oi had informed me that my original contract for the old cable service would end on 18 August 2015 and that I would need to sign up to the new service under a different contract. This could be done either on-line or at the Oi shop in the city centre. I looked on-line and discovered that the only service avail­able to me at my address was the 2 Mbps ADSL service, the advertisement for which, as it appeared on Oi's website, is shown on the left. This box-ad was the only information available about the ser­vice prior to signing up to purchase it. I decided to buy from the Oi shop in the city, where the sales­person showed me the same box-ad in the Oi brochure. I assumed that "MEGA" meant "mega­bits per second". I signed an order form for the service, which contained nothing about price. I reasonably assumed that the price for the service was as stated in the box-ad, which I had been shown by the salesperson and from which I chose the service.

Only 18 days after the installation of this ridiculous Internet service, the first bill arrived. What a surprise. Or perhaps it wasn't a surprise really, knowing Oi.

INTERNET

Description	Period	VALUE (R$)
Monthly Charge	01/08 a 31/08	87,74
Discount 1 (16/07-31/10)	01/08 a 31/08	-7,84
Discount 2 (26/03-25/06)	01/08 a 31/08	-17,55
Interruption of service	01/07 a 31/07	-0,08
SUBTOTAL		62,27

CABLE TV SERVICE

Description	Period	VALUE (R$)
Monthly Charge	01/08 a 31/08	79,20
Promotional Discount	01/08 a 31/08	-3,24
SUBTOTAL		75,24
TOTAL		137,51

Oi had said that the contract for the cable TV service would terminate automatic­ally on 18 August 2015. I have been charged for the whole month of August and it looks as if they haven't terminated it at all. Of course, I expected some adjustment for the use of the old service up until 18 August 2015. Notwithstanding, the char­ges shown on the bill far exceed the amount of such an adjustment.

More significantly, however, the new Internet service was sold to me at R$49,90 per month. No mention of any temporariness to this price at the time of purchase. How do they possibly arrive at the monthly price of R$87,74, which is 76% higher? The creativity of conniving accountants and lawyers, who have probably placed all kinds of trap clauses in the terms and conditions of the contract, which was no­where available prior to purchase and a copy of which I have so far been unable to obtain.

Looking at the contract number on the bill, I see that it is the same as it was before, namely, 50627284. The original Way TV/Internet contract, which I entered into on 19 October 2004, was 00627284. It appears that, when Oi took over W@y, Oi simply changed the first zero into a 5 to distinguish the old W@y contract numbers from its own contract numbers. It would seem, therefore, that no new contract has been enacted. Consequently, it would appear that, as far as Oi is concerned, no­thing has changed other than to substitute an inferior Internet "service" for the good one I had for the past 11 years.

The upshot is that Oi appears to have lied to me at every turn. It is therefore little wonder that Oi seems to be enveloped by a swarm of dubious characters of every kind, who have been pestering me throughout, offering bogus service contracts. These third parties attempt to inveigle out of me every kind of personal informa­tion, including name, address, postal code, tax number, credit card and bank acc­ount details, purportedly "for reference". Where do these people get the informa­tion that I am having a new installation. There is only one possible source, namely, Oi.

The Oi Cable Television Service

In the light of all this trouble with the Internet service, I decided not to have Oi's satellite TV service. I cancelled the television element of the Oi contract on 27 Aug­ust 2015. It was a memorable phone call.

The Oi telephone operative said that, because I had exceeded the 18 August dead­line, the television service could not now be cancelled until the parabolic dish for the new satellite service had been installed. Why, I ask myself, would Oi go to the ex­pense of installing a parabolic dish on the roof of my building when it knew I would cancel the service immediately it was installed? I later discovered that the terms of the new service stated that, once the new satellite system was installed, there was a minimum period of 12 months before cancellation would be possible. I stated that I had had the contract for 11 years and could cancel it at any time at a month's notice.

The Oi operative then embarked upon a furore of shouting and railing, saying that the service was under a new contract which had a 12 month minimum period. When asked the number of the new contract, of which I had no prior sight or know­ledge, the operative replied that it was 21941048. I made an enquiry via the Oi website, stating that my contract number was 21941048. Oi's server replied that no contract existed under that number. I raised my voice above the Oi operative's shouting, saying that I was hereby cancelling the Oi television service. The Oi oper­ative continued with his shouting and railing. I simply hung up.

Currently the old cable TV service seems to be continuing — and being charged for — as before. Judging from the bill, it would seem that this was set to continue in­def­initely.

On 22 October 2015 a woman (purporting to be from Oi) telephoned me asking when would be a convenient time to collect the old set-top box [General Instru­ments CFT 2200 + remote controller] and the old modem [Motorola Surfboard SB5101 + power unit]. I told her tomorrow morning would be fine. She said a techn­ician would collect these items between 08:30 and 12:30 on Friday 23 October 2015. No protocol number was given for the collection. I gathered the items and put them together on the table ready for collection. The technician never showed up. As of 05 June 2017, Oi has never collected the old devices.

Up to October 2015, the television service was still being delivered via the coaxial cable, although the cable Internet service signals had long since disappeared. It is two months and 6 days after Oi said the cable service would be terminated. My bill from Oi, issued on 03 October 2015, charged for television service for the entire month of October. Perhaps the technician had reason not to show up. If he had then taken the equipment on Friday 23 October 2015, the charges on the bill for the rest of October could not be justified because, without the set-top box, I would not be physically able to receive the Oi cable television service. Oi gave no Número de Protocolo for my cancellation call of 27 August 2015. Consequently, there is no official Oi record that my call had taken place. However, the charges for the whole of the month of October are visibly recorded on my bill, which is in my possession and is irrefutable.

In the evening of Sunday 01 November 2015 at about 20:50 hrs, I switched on the television to see if the Oi cable TV service was still there. It was, but without all the subscription channels. Only the free channels were available, which are available anyway from the terrestrial antenna. However, at 22:15 hrs, the programme dis­appeared and was replaced by a message saying that my decoder had been de­activated. I shall wait and see whether or not the charges reflect the cessation of service at this date and time.

Oi: Evaluation

Having completed all this work to effect the change over to their new service, where am I now? I am still able to view Web pages, although I don't do much Web-browsing. I could view Web-based videos but this is not something that interests me. I am still able to send and receive emails through my email client. I am still able to maintain my hosted website via passive FTP. I am able to maintain my cloud stor­age. But not much else.

My LAN is still completely firewalled against incoming requests. Consequently, as of a few hours after the old W@y Internet service ceased, my articles and essays are no longer available to my friends, colleagues — and other interested people around the world — even though this activity generates no more than 5 megabytes or so per day of Internet traffic from my computer. Oi has thus shut me down, shut me up and gagged me!

The up and down velocities of the new Oi service are exactly the same as the old discontinued W@y Internet service, except that the latter was completely open. If Oi is worried about too much traffic being generated by my servers, its technicians can always use throttle-back routines to slow it down, should it veer over the pre­scribed limit. The old W@y Internet service did exactly this. Another way an ISP could achieve the same thing is to impose a (hopefully reasonable) monthly data transfer quota of so many gigabytes (GB).

Please note that 5 megabytes (5242880 bits) per day, which my servers generate on average, is equivalent to a constant upload speed of just over 60 bits per second, which is 1/8640th of the maximum permitted up­load speed. So Oi has no reason to block my ports on that basis.

Before the event of purchase, Oi lied to me each time when I asked repeatedly for verification that the incoming ports I required would be open to my computer. Imm­ediately after installation, I tested the ports in two ways.

1. I used a remote port testing site, which saw all the required ports as open.
2. I ran the relevant programs, which both saw all the required ports as open.

The installation technician asked me if the service was functioning as I wanted it. I answered that it was, and signed his form to this effect. Less than 5 minutes after the technician left, the ports closed. And they remained closed.

The situation I am now in is like subscribing to a telephone service through which I can make out-going calls to other people but can never receive calls from anybody. All the other subscribers are in the same situation. Consequently, the only way they can communicate with each other is by leaving recorded messages at a central voice mail facility, run by the service provider, where they could be potentially scr­utinized. To receive messages, each subscriber must periodically ring in to his voice mail box. Subscribers are unable ever to engage in direct person-to-person calls.

By blocking listening ports contrary to a customer's wishes, Oi too is violating the Suggested Practices of the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group, the emboldened heading statements of which are repeated below.

• ISPs should avoid port blocking unless they have no reasonable alternatives available for preventing unwanted traffic and protecting users.
• ISPs that can reasonably provide to their users opt-­out provisions or exceptions to their port blocking policies should do so.
• ISPs should publicly disclose their port blocking policies.
• ISPs should make communications channels available for feedback about port blocking policies.
• ISPs should revisit their port blocking policies on a regular basis and reassess whether the threats that required the port blocking rules continue to be relevant.
• Port blocking (or firewall) rules of consumers’ devices should be user-configurable.

I cannot find any reference to ports (portas in Portuguese) in any of the following documents (at least, this is the case at the time of writing):

• Sumario Oferta Banda Larga Alta Densidade R1
• Regulamento Ofertas Banda Larga Da Oi–Regiões De Alta Densidade
• Contrato De Adesão À Banda Larga Da Oi Categoria Residencial

Consequently, since the original W@y service, which Oi had taken over, had ports open, I think it reasonable that I should assume that the replacement service should also have ports open. But clearly this is not the case. It would seem there­fore, at least to me, that the closing of all ports is a covert action, which Oi has taken uni­laterally.

Sadly,because of the terms of the Oi contract, I will be imprisoned in this situation for a full 12 months. What Oi is offering is not really an Internet service: it is, for the most part, merely a Web access service. So it's function is mis-stated. Notwith­standing, it would appear that, for Internet services, I have run out of choices. There are only 3 possible ISPs who can provide a service to my premises. Two of them block all incoming request packets, which leaves only one more, which I shall come to later.

Appeal to ANATEL

I found it impossible to break or circumvent Oi's impervious wall of ignorance and lies. The lies, of course are understandable. Oi is a commercial corporation. I do, however, find Oi's apparent technical ignorance more difficult to swallow. It is in­conceivable to me that a nation-wide telecommunications company like Oi could contain nobody who understood what closed listening ports were. After all, Oi must have deliberately and specifically closed them. It cannot have been the work of anybody else. I must conclude, therefore, that the technical ignorance exhibited by Oi must be feigned ignorance. In other words, it's yet another lie.

This raises the question of what Oi's motive could be feigning technical ignorance about closed listening ports. That it is their full intention to block my listening ports is well evinced by the fact that, by apparently modifying the DSL-2500E modem's nor­mal firmware, Oi has denied me access to the specific parts of the modem's con­figuration facility necessary for liberating the listening ports.

I therefore had to find another avenue through which to try to resolve my problem of blocked listening ports.

Scouring the Web, I quickly discovered that others have this same problem with Oi's violation of the Suggested Practices of the Broadband Internet Technical Ad­visory Group by blocking listening ports contrary to users' wishes. Registering a complaint here may help a little but I doubt very much whether it will resolve the problem. I needed to make my complaint official.

The official place to complain about ISP services in Brazil is the "Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações" (Anatel). This is the Brazilian government's Communications Regulator, which is the counterpart of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States and the Office of Telecommunications (Ofcom) in the United Kingdom. To register a complaint with Anatel, it is necessary to fill in the fields of Anatel's Web-based complaints form. At the end of the form an option is provided for attaching a PDF document. I therefore decided to prepare my case off-line as a PDF file ready to attach when I registered my complaint on-line.

I prepared my complaint, which is a précis of selected parts of this essay, and sub­mitted it to Anatel on 26 August 2015.

Technician's Visit

The response was very fast. At 18:17 hrs. on 27 August 2015, Oi rang from 021 32­651100 (Rio de Janeiro) giving Protocol 20151126739278. The woman was very polite, saying that Anatel had contacted Oi about my closed ports, that this situa­tion was not just and that it was an oversight on the part of Oi. She asked for a time and date for a technician to come and rectify the problem. I arranged for the technician to come between 08:00 and 12:00 hrs. on the following day (28 August 2015) to re-configure the modem so that the necessary incoming (listening) ports would be open.

The Oi technician arrived at 08:15 and left at 10:15 hrs. on Friday 28 August 2015. He resolved nothing. In fact, he left me without access to the Internet at all. Fort­unately, I was able to regain the same limited service I had before he came by un­plugging the modem from its power supply and re-connecting its power supply a couple of minutes later. I have had to go through this procedure several times during the time since the new service was installed at 11:15 hrs. on Tuesday 18 August 2015 [10 days before].

I first demonstrated for the technician the settings of the two radio buttons on the modem's DEFAULT ACTION STATUS screen as shown below.

Outgoing Default Action:	◉ Permit	◌ Deny
Incoming Default Action:	◌ Permit	◉ Deny

I told him that I did not have the necessary level of access to the modem's con­figuration facility to change this setting to set the "Incoming Default Action" to "Permit".

I also showed him the Internet Configuration page as shown on the right. Please click on image for an enlarged view. This shows the NAPT (Network Ad­dress & Port Translation) disabled. Again, I told him that I did not have the necessary level of access to the modem's configuration facility to change this setting either. Consequently, my servers could not receive unsolicited incoming request packets from people wanting to search or download my essays. This was all apparently new to him. He made a long telephone call (presumably to his superior) about what I had told him. The technician reset the modem's configuration using a tooth-pick. He con­nected my computer directly to the modem (by­passing my router).

He could access nothing. This is because my computer has a fixed IP on the LAN, which the modem would not accept. He messed about with my computer trying to access the Internet through the Firefox browser. He could access nothing. My comp­uter clearly was unable to find a DNS. He then got his laptop from his van and plug­ged it into the modem. He managed to access his employer's website. Ob­viously, his laptop was set to auto-discovery mode for DNS. He appeared to use this web­site to conduct a diagnostic test on the modem. He said that the modem was faulty. He installed another modem. He tested it with his laptop and managed to access a website to test the download speed. He said that the download speed was above the 2 Mbps contracted and that, as far as he was concerned, the service was work­ing and that the problem was with my computers and router. He said there was nothing else that he could do, or was obliged to do. Having spent two hours mess­ing about, he left having achieved nothing.

He repeatedly emphasised that opening and closing ports was entirely to do with my router, which was outside his jurisdiction. He clearly knew practically nothing about configuring the gateway within the modem or even what ports were. I was back where I started. My appeal to Anatel had achieved nothing. It seems that this technically simple problem is commercially unresolvable.

Subsequent Connection Problems

Ever since the beginning, on 17 August 2015, this service had been problematic. It would frequently refuse to access the Internet for long periods. The only way to get it to work was to switch off the modem, wait a few minutes then switch it on again. This had to be done repeatedly until it worked. During 02 September 2015, after only 16 days of so-called "use" of the service, it became ever more difficult to ac­cess the Internet. Finally, at about 22:00 hrs. it became impossible to access any­thing at all. The service had been effectively locked. I continued trying the next morning all to no avail. I had tried everything: unplugging all the cables and re-connecting them, connecting my computer directly to the modem thus bypassing my router, changing my computer's network configuration from fixed LAN addres­ses to DHCP automatic discovery. Nothing worked.

Finally I called the Oi help line on telephone number 103-31. I made the first call before 07:30 hrs. on 03 September 2015, Protocolo 201511298819497. The person attending could not resolve the problem. She said she would pass my call to an­other technician. I was kept hanging on the line for over 20 minutes. I hung up (termin­ated the call). I called the same number 103-31 again at 07:55 hrs., Proto­colo 2015 1129826694. The person attending this time seemed more knowledge­able. She asked me to access the modem configuration wizard at the LAN IP addr­ess '192.168.1.1/wizardoi' and to enter usuário [user name] oi@oi and senha [pass­word] oioi. The modem went through an automatic configuration process to open my Oi Internet service account. I was then able to access web pages. I reconnected my computer through the router and re-tested. Thus, at 08:25 hrs. when the tele­phone call to Oi terminated, the computers could once again access web pages on the outside Inter­net.

From this it would seem that, although I have been billed for this service from 17 August 2015, my Oi Internet connection was only registered at 08:25 on 03 Sept­ember 2015. Of course, all ports are still closed to all unsolicited incoming IP packets, which renders the service of little practical use to me.

After 24 days of this ordeal, I am tired and stressed. I must now embark on a phase of recognition and acceptance that for me a complete basic Internet service is un­obtainable in Brazil. I will have to get used to the idea that I will now have to pass my essays to somebody in a free country to serve onto the Internet for me.

The Old and The New

Oi has replaced a service, provided through what it describes as antiquated techn­ology (RF cable), by a "better" service provided through new "more advanced" technology (ADSL). Below is a side-by-side comparison of the old W@y Internet cable service with the new Oi ADSL service.

	W@y Internet	Oi Internet	NET
Physical Link	RF Coax	ADSL	RF Coax
Type of Modem	Motorola SB5101	D-Link DSL-2500E	RCA DHG534B
Speed: incoming	2 Mbps	2 Mbps	15 Mbps
Speed: outgoing	512 kbps	512 kbps	2 Mbps
IP Address	Fixed	Dynamic	Dynamic
Ports†	UNRESTRICTED	ALL BLOCKED	ALL BLOCKED
Price‡ Quoted	R$----.----	R$49.90	R$89.90
Price‡ Charged	R$87.74	R$87.74	R$----.----
Price‡ Discounted	R$62.30	R$62.27	R$----.----
Length of Service	11 years	"18" Days	1 Day
Quality of Service	No complaints	Problematic*	Failed Ports Tests

† for the reception of unsolicited incoming IP packets
‡ actual monthly subscription charges for the service
*Frequent authentication failures which are difficult and
  time-consuming to resolve, plus
  complete service failure every time it rains.

The price quoted for the old W@y Internet service is no longer meaningful because it was quoted 11 years ago. The discounted price is the amount actually charged. It seems to be arrived at through a battery of incomprehensible discounts. Notwith­standing, the discounted price of the current Oi service is almost 25% higher than the price that was quoted to me at the time of the changeover. Thus I am now pay­ing essentially the same price for a vastly inferior service. The length of service shown for the new service is 18 days since installation at the time of writing. How­ever, I don't think it is entirely correct to call it length of service.

It is well evident from the above table that the NET service, although it too failed the open ports test, was by far the better offer. Oi succeeded in getting my busi­ness for its "service" by lying about the ports being open. Now I am stuck with it. I suppose it is my fault for expecting honesty from salespeople.

To me, W@y Internet seemed to be a proper ISP with in-house technicians and ad­ministrators who provided a proper service. My distinct and reluctant impression of Oi (and equally, of NET) is that they are just a bunch of accountants who out-source practically all aspects of their operation to dubious one-man-and-his-dog outfits who exhibit the barest smattering of technical knowledge. This is evinced by the fact that, try as I might over the course of 10 whole days, I could not get to speak to anybody, within this entire enormous company, that had any knowledge above that of drilling holes in walls and plugging cables into modems. Let the inward in­vestor beware!

A Partial Solution

After a little break doing other things, I decided to have one last try at opening my listening ports. By means of a tooth pick, I physically reset the modem back to its factory defaults. Of course, in this state, the Oi service refused to connect me to the Internet. I had to re-register my connection using the Oi Wizard, which was part of Oi's modified version of the modem's firmware. I re-registered and was, once again, able to access the Internet with closed listening ports.

I had previously tried to reproduce Oi's WAN-side PPPoE settings except with the NAPT facility disabled. The Oi service would simply not accept this. I had no option but to live with the modem's NAPT enabled as per the standard Oi configuration. This left me with two NAPT gateways (one in the Oi modem and one in my router) operating in series, a situation which is definitely not recommended.

I had to consider carefully how my servers, running within my computer (PC1) app­eared from the point of view of each of these two NAPT gateways. I had to start with my servers, as shown on the light cyan coloured background in the following diagram, and work backwards towards my Internet connection.

The first part was easy. It was as it had always been. My router perceived my ser­vers to be running inside PC1 (at address 192.168.2.100). I checked the router's NAPT forwarding entries. All were in order. The question now was, where does the NAPT gateway in the modem perceive my servers to be located? Does it see them as being in my computer (192.168.2.100) or does it see them as effectively running inside my router (192.168.1.2)?

Then I realised that the modem's NAPT gateway cannot see the addresses of de­vices on the Inner LAN because the router's NAPT translates to them from its own WAN-ward address (192.168.1.2). Thus, from the point of view of the modem's NAPT, my servers are programs running inside my router. That's probably why they are called virtual servers.

I therefore, once again, opened the modem's browser-based configuration facility and set up my virtual servers as running on my router (at Outer LAN address 192.168.1.2). The entries I put in the modem's Virtual Server Forwarding Table are shown on the left. Please click the im­age for a larger view. Note that the ports are forwarded to my TP-Link TL-WR741N router (at 192.168.1.2 on the Outer LAN) and not to my computer PC1 (at 192.168.2.100 on Inner LAN).

I then shut everything down, waited a few minutes, and then powered everything up again from a cold start. I went and did something else for half an hour while the modem synchronized itself with the Oi service. I returned to my computer and start­ed aMule. I went away and came back 10 minutes later. I had green indicators. This meant that aMule's listening ports were open. It was no longer firewalled. I started Gtk-gnutella. After a few minutes it was indicating open listening ports. So, at 12:34 on 6 October 2015, after being "off the air" for 50 days, my essays and articles were once again available through the eDonkey, Kademlia, gnutella and G2 net­works.

Next, I started my FTP and Web servers. I then used the canyouseeme.org port checker to look for my services on Port 21 and Port 80. They were not there. These ports were being blocked at some point beyond the WAN-ward side of the modem. They were probably blocked at the ISP's distribution router's gateway. This suggests to me that the original table showing the ports blocked by Oi for its residential and commercial accounts respectively, is probably correct. Perhaps, if I were to change to a commercial account, even though I am retired and on a very small pension, then my HTTP (Web), FTP and SMTP ports would be open.

The fact that the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Port 25 is closed is rather dis­appointing for the following reason. Microsoft has — for no good reason — decided to block my emails from its network. Consequently, people with Hotmail accounts, with whom I have been corresponding for decades, can no longer receive my emails. Google's Gmail has also made things difficult by presuming to prohibit mail attach­ments with certain kinds of content, which my colleagues and I need to exchange. Our solution was going to be to set up mail servers in our own comput­ers, which we proposed to leave running permanently. With certain ISPs (including Oi) blocking Port 25, this will no longer be an option for us. It gives us the feeling that certain corporate entities are trying to squeeze us out of existence.

Thus, I have now arrived at the situation, as illustrated below, which I expected when I decided to take on Oi's replacement to the W@y Internet service. It isn't ideal. It isn't what W@y provided. But it will have to suffice for the time being.

W@y	Oi1	Oi2	Application
Pass	Pass	Pass	client HTTP access via Web browser
Pass	Pass	Pass	client SMTP/POP3 Email access via Thunderbird
Pass	Pass	Pass	client FTP access to my hosted web space
Pass	Fail	Pass	High ID access to eDonkey/Kademlia
Pass	Fail	Pass	High ID access to Gnutella/G2
Pass	Fail	Fail	FTP server
Pass	Fail	Fail	HTTP server

Notwithstanding, getting this far has cost me 50 days of lost serving time. It has also cost me around 35 days of personal effort in learning about the D-Link DSL- 2500E modem and the particular difficulties encountered in setting up two NAPT gateways to operate in series. All this work, Oi, in effect externalized onto my shoulders. It would have taken a matter of minutes for an Oi technician, with day-to-day famili­arity of this modem, to quickly set up the virtual server ports for me, or at least give me a few words of orientation as to how I should go about doing it myself. But neither the Oi technician nor his supervisors would do that. Neither would anybody I attempted to talk to on the Oi help line. In fact, in this whole matter, Oi appeared to me to exhibit a distinct attitude of non-cooperation. For some reason, although Oi has no legitimate basis for stopping me from opening my ports, they didn't seem to want me to have open ports. Why?

Here Come The Rains

During the early hours of Tuesday, 17 November 2015, the first major rain of the season fell and continued most of the following day. As usual during heavy rain, the telephone line failed — obviously due to water getting into the ageing cable or the concentrator box on the street post about 500 metres from my building. Again as usual, I had to ask a relative to call Oi to report the fault. The following day, 18 November 2015, my relative called my cell phone asking if the normal phone line were working now. I checked the phone. It was working fine.

Shortly afterwards, at 12:40 hrs. a person purporting to be from Oi called my cell phone. The caller's number was 346, which, being so short, I would think could only be a special number used by the telephone company. The caller said he needed my help to do some tests on the line. He asked me to disconnect Oi's ADSL modem from the telephone line and remove the ADSL filter from the telephone so that the telephone was connected directly to the line without an ADSL filter. This I did. I thought he probably wanted to conduct an insulation resistance test on the line. However, he immediately asked me to pick up the phone and test to see if it was working. I did so. I could obtain a dial tone. The phone was working.

The caller then told me that the cause of the problem was a faulty ADSL filter at my premises. I could use the phone without the Internet or use the Internet without the phone. To use both I would have to replace the faulty filter. He said that I would have to buy the new filter since the replacement of filters was the customer's res­ponsibility. He then said he could recommend an Information Technology company to come and replace the filter for me. At my expense, of course. I refused the re­commendation, saying I would buy a new filter from a source I knew. I reconnected the filter back into my telephone's signal cord so that the phone and the modem were as they had been before. The Internet still worked. The phone still worked.

I had smelt a rat immediately this Oi technician started talking. The filters were sup­plied by Oi as part of the service rental, and are therefore legally Oi's respons­ibility. They had done only just over 2 months of service. They are completely pass­ive components and therefore are not much more likely to go wrong than would a piece of wire. What the Oi technician had told me was complete bullshit. I suspect that the Information Technology company he recommended was his own little "bus­iness on the side" and that all this was about making himself some extra money by lying about the cause of the line failure.

On 20 November 2015 we had another rain storm. And, true to form, at 16:50 hrs. both the phone and the Internet went dead. Just the same old crackling line. I con­tacted my relative again by cell phone (second time in 4 days) to report the service outage. I wonder what cock and bull reason they will try to foist upon me this time. They will probably say a lightening strike to the line burned out my modem and I'll have to buy another one, even though it is Oi's modem supplied as part of the service rental. That won't wash with me though. I always, without fail, disconnect both modem and phone from the line at the first rumble of thunder. The phone and Internet came on again at 08:00 hrs 21 November 2015, Although I have very grave doubts that it was due to any repairs Oi may or may not have carried out. I think that the restoration of the service was entirely due to the cable and the concen­trator box drying out on their own.

The post shown in the photograph on the right is for power and signal services entering the building in which my apartment is located. The 50-pair telephone cable, as far as I can make out, enters through the open-ended vertical plastic pipe on the left of the post. Looking at the enlarged version of the picture, it is possible to see that it is the cable forming the coil on the right of the post. It is easy to see how water from heavy rain could drain down the cable into the vertical open end of the plastic pipe. This cable is pieced into a larger cable somewhere in between two street posts.

This cable, along with a large number of others, is strung along the street posts for two blocks to the post shown in the photograph on the left, which is located at a cross-roads. As can be seen, a veritable rat's nest of power and signal cables cross, turn and go their separate ways at this post. Throughout this route, many spurious open-ended wires and flexes hang right down to the pave­ment. They appear to be discarded without being taken away. These could be remains of attempts to piece into a television or Internet signal cable to get free access at the expense of a legitimate customer, thereby stealing some of his bandwidth. It is what the locals call a "gato" (cat). The cable carrying my tele­phone pair now makes a right turn.

It then continues for a further 3 blocks to the box cont­aining the local concentrator and distribution equipment, which is shown attached to the post in the adjacent photograph. The cable has thus covered about 500 met­res from my building to this somewhat dilapidated look­ing steel box. Please click on the photograph for a larger scale view. Notice that the weather protection sleeving has come adrift from the bottom of the smaller box on the left of the post. Rain water can drain down the ex­posed cables into the sleeving and thereby potentially cause problems. The major culprit, for the recurring int­erruptions in service I have suffered, is however, in my opinion, the age and bad condition of the 500 metres of cable between this box and my apartment building.

I remember when, during the rains of 2013/14, my telephone eventually failed com­pletely as usual. I asked my relative to call Oi. An Oi technician came and asked for access to the telephone wire distribution box down in the garage. He was an older man, probably approaching retirement. I watched him make his tests. He said that he had to search for a good wire-pair. He said the cable connecting the distribution box in the garage with the concentrator in the other street contained 50 pairs of telephone wires. But the cable was very old. Over the years, the cable swaying in the wind gradually fatigues the thin steel wires. Eventually breaks occur. One knows not where. Consequently, pair after pair becomes useless. An intact spare pair has to be found each time a pair becomes too fragmented. He event­ually found a good pair and with it restored my telephone service.

On Saturday 16 January 2016, I had to ask my relative again to call Oi because the telephone line had failed completely. A younger man came this time. He said that the number of intact wire-pairs in the cable had become very few. So much so that there was no longer enough wire-pairs for everybody. Many people were dispensing with their fixed telephone lines, opting to use only their cell phones. Thus the dem­and was dropping. However, many people used the telephone line also for ADSL Internet service. He said this scarcity had caused a war between the various tele­phone service companies. The result was that when one company's client in the apartment building reported a faulty line, its technician would rob a wire-pair from another company's client. Then the other company's client would report a fault, and so on. It was still raining and this man went away unable to resolve the prob­lem.

At about 22:00 hrs that night, I received a call on my cell phone from a number in São Paulo. It was an Oi operative responding to my relative's call that my telephone and Internet services were not working. I told him it was a cable problem, which occurred every time it rained, so it was obviously something that could not be re­solved over the phone in my apartment. Despite this, he asked me to take the low-pass filter out of my telephone cord and reconnect. He tried to call my fixed phone. Nothing happened. I reconnected the filter. He then asked me to try the Internet. The rain had by then lightened a little and the ADSL service had started to work intermittently. He made tests remotely and said it appeared that the problem was because my modem was not configured properly. This was ridiculous. How could its configuration change all by itself? It was clearly because the service kept dropping in and out as indicated by the Internet LED on the modem flipping between green and red.

He asked me to connect my modem directly to my computer without my router in between. I did so, knowing full well that what he was trying to do would not work. And naturally, the modem did not recognize the LAN fixed IP address of my comp­uter so I could not even get through to the modem's configuration web interface. I decided to ignore what he had asked me to do and reconnected my router. I could then access the modem's web interface without any trouble. He then asked me to access the modem's Oi-wizard, which would automatically reconfigure the modem. I went through the pointless process of reconfiguring the modem, after which I was able to access the Oi website. He terminated the call after having "resolved" my problem. Within 10 minutes it started raining hard again and both the telephone and the Internet failed completely again. Hey-ho!

I'd had enough that night, so decided to leave it until the next day (Sunday) to ask my relative to call Oi again. He made an appointment for a technician to come again on Monday 18 January 2016. At 11:50 hrs that morning a young man called Tiago arrived. He must have been over 2 metres tall. He seemed frustrated by the number of faulty wire-pairs. I asked him if it wasn't time the company replaced this ageing cable. He said he thought Oi hadn't enough money to do that. My cynical thought was that they may not have enough money to replace the cable but they certainly had enough to give a good return to their share holders. Tiago then em­barked on a series of trips back and forth between my building and the street box 500 metres away in another street. He persevered with this until he found a sound pair of wires for my telephone connection. He left me with a good line. The tele­phone and Internet both worked fine.

At 15:40 hrs I received a phone call on my fixed phone from 062 3240 3399. It was an automated call which asked me to press "1" if my telephone was working prop­erly now. I pressed "1". Tiago's work was well tested that night through prolong­ed heavy rain. The connection remained solid, which I expect it will do until that wire-pair also breaks. The following is a diary of service failures, which correspond ex­actly with the local rainfall.

Phone	Internet	Failed		Restored		Downtime
Failed	OK†	17NOV2015	05:22	18NOV2015	12:00	30:38	hrs
Failed	Failed	20NOV2015	16:50	21NOV2015	08:00	15:10
Failed	Failed	29NOV2015	16:15	30NOV2015	06:30	14:15
Failed	OK†	02DEC2015	20:00	02DEC2015	21:30	01:30
Failed	Failed	07DEC2015	00:20	07DEC2015	05:30	05:10
Failed	Failed	08DEC2015	00:45	08DEC2015	07:30	06:45
Failed	Failed	18DEC2015	16:50	18DEC2015	17:05	00:15
Failed	OK†	30DEC2015	17:45	31DEC2015	00:00	06:45
Failed	Failed	12JAN2016	20:00	13JAN2016	07:15	11:15
Failed	Failed	15JAN2016	03:10	15JAN2016	13:50	10:40
Failed	Failed	15JAN2016	14:15	16JAN2016	21:45	31:30
Failed	Failed	16JAN2016	22:15	18JAN2016	13:30	39:15
Failed	Failed	08APR2016	11:00	09APR2016	18:30	31:30	1
Failed	Failed	24JUN2016	06:30	25JUN2016	15:00	20:30
Failed	Failed	30JUN2016	06:00	01JUL2016	15:30	20:30
Failed	OK†	23NOV2016	16:00	25NOV2016	15:30	41:00	2
Failed	OK†	24MAY2019	19:00	27MAY2019	16:40	69:40	3
Failed	OK†	12JULY2019	19:00	16JULY2019	11:30	88:30
Failed	Failed	13NOV2019	12:00	18NOV2019	09:10	122:50	4,5
Failed	Failed	03OCT2020	03:14	17OCT2020	15:35	372:31
Failed	OK†	19OCT2021	12:15	07DEC2021	10:00	>50 days	6
Cut	Cut	08AUG2022	00:00	10Aug2022	00:00	7 days	7
Cut	Cut	20SEP2022	00:00	00XXX0000	00:00	Permanent	8
Cut	Cut	21SEP2022	10:15	00XXX0000	00:00	Permanent	9

see continuation of interruptions with Claro.

1. 08APR2016: returned from a week's holiday. Telephone line dead except for a low constant 60 Hz hum. Went to mother's apartment and dialled 103-31 for Oi service. Followed the automatic voice procedure to obtain a protocolo and then wait for human attendance. Human operative told me that nothing could be done without access to the faulty telephone. I said that I could not phone from home because the telephone there was faulty - dor! Was told I would have to use a cell phone. Went back home and called 103-31 on my cell phone. Given Protocolo 20161052399075.Went through torturous pro­cedure to get human attendance. Kept waiting a long time. Call eventually dropped. Called again. Protocolo 20161052402789. Went through the same tedious procedure to obtain human attendance. Operative tried to call my phone: It did not ring. Told to do the following obviously futile tests: 1) remove ADSL low pass filter from telephone line. Operative tried to call my phone: It did not ring. 2) reverse the cable between the wall socket and the phone. Operative tried to call my phone: It did not ring. 3) substitute an old phone that was known to be working last time it was used. Operative tried to call my phone: It did not ring. I was told that a technician would come to my apartment the next day Saturday 09APR2016 between 08:00 and 12:00 hrs. Awated the technician's arrival. Missed a call on my cell phone from 0213296325 11:16:20 hrs. Rang off before I could answer the call. Suspect that it could be from Oi but not certain. Waited in until 12:30. Technician never showed up. However, telephone functional again by 18:30 hrs.

2. Service request to Oi Protocolo 20161152078362 24NOV2016. Tecnico: José attended 09:00 25NOV2016

3. 19h00 24/05/2019 telephone line cut. 27/05/2019 08h35 Oi tech visited. Tested line. Went. Returned saying bandits had robbed a section of cable in the street. Phone working again 16h40.

4. 12h00 13/11/2019 phone & internet dead. Friend called Oi. Tech came 08h30 Thu 14/11/2019. Tested line. Could not find the fault. Later discovered about 40 metres of 50-pair telephone cable had been cut and stolen from the street posts. Saw the cut cable hanging down at first post downhill from our building. Noticed at 14h15 on Friday 15/11/2019 [Republic Day] that the cable had been replaced. But our phone was still dead.

5. 15/11/2019 [Republic Day] the street cable was replaced. Notwithstanding, both my telephone and Internet were still dead. Contacted Oi again on Saturday 16/11/2019 at 18h00. Asked to repeat the silly internal line test again which I was asked to do at the beginning. Agenda technician's visit [Protocol 20191052289304] for early Monday morning 18/11/2019 [5 days after the the line went dead. Monday 18/11/2019 Oi technician came again and resolved the problem. Telephone & Internet service restored at 09h10 after 122h50 of downtime.

6. Thu 21 Oct 2021 Protocolo 20213831068524. See Addendum 19 Oct 2021

7. Mon 08 Aug 2022 service terminated by Oi as they no longer support service by telephone cable and I couldn't face the enormous and inevitable work-load, problems and stress in getting a newly supplied Internet connection service to function properly, partially or at all.

8. Tue 20 Sep 2022: Sometime during the morning, without warning, Oi cut our phone off again.

9. Tue 20 Sep 2022: 10h15, again without warning, Oi cut the Internet also.

† If there is an intermittent break in the phone cable, the phone will go dead when it gaps. However, if the gap is small, there can be sufficient capacitive coupling across the break for the much higher frequencies of the DSL signal to pass. I know when a failure occurs in the early hours because the telephone dings intermittently and wakes me up. I have heard it said that the reason for these outages is that, due to the permanent economic crisis in Brazil, thieves cut lengths of cable from the street distribution poles to sell on the black market.

As Best As Can Be Expected

On 26 November 2015 I received my monthly telephone bill from Oi covering the services purportedly rendered during the month of November.

At this point, I need to clarify the arrangement of the billing for the three services previously rendered to me by Oi. These are:

1. conventional fixed (wired) telephone service
2. cable television service
3. Internet service

From antiquity (long before 2004) I have had a conventional fixed (wired) telephone service. This was originally supplied to me by Telemar, which, somewhere along the way, became Oi. This was, until the end of October 2015, always billed completely separately from any other Oi service.

From 18 October 2004, I contracted a combined cable television and Internet ser­vice from W@y TV. Obviously, this was billed to me by W@y TV and was nothing to do with Oi. Sometime, during the intervening dec­ade, W@y TV was taken over by Oi. From that time, Oi billed me for the cable television and Internet service pre­viously rendered by W@y TV.

Consequently, I received two bills from Oi every month:

1. for my fixed telephone service
2. for the combined cable television and Internet services.

So, on 26 November 2015 I received my November telephone bill from Oi. How­ever, as well as the charges for my November telephone usage, the bill contained also a charge of R$49.89 for the Oi Velox Internet service. Gosh! One whole cent­avo cheaper than advertised!

Like all commercial bills nowadays, this telephone bill is presented in a form that is essentially incomprehensible. Only by spending time analysing and comparing items was I able to construct the cogent representation of the information within it, which is shown below.

Phone	Assinatura Plano Franquia LDN	16.03
	Oi Fixo Sem Limites	14.94
	Franq. 30 min - Qualquer Móvel	13.78
	Assinatura sem Franquia Oi Fixo	20.99
	Pacote Fale Digital	4.26
	Phone Subtotal ................		70.00
Internet	Velox 2Mbps	34.99
	Antivirus+Backup+Educa	14.90
	Downtime	-1.19
	Internet Subtotal .............		48.70
Charity	Contribution		20.00
	Total Payable ...................		138.70

This month's account is correct. The only serious overcharge has been the fact that, from 18 August to 31 October 2015 (a period of 75 days) I was charged a discount­ed price of R$62.35 (full price R$87.74) for the inferior Internet service instead of its proper price of R$49.89. This works out to a total overcharge of R$31.15.

A more significant frustration is that I will be charged, from now onwards, R$14.90 per month for the use of Antivirus software, a cloud Backup service and some ob­scure thing called Educa, all of which only function on computers running Micro­soft Windows. Since all my computers run Linux, I have no means of using them. Thus I am forced to pay, month by month, for three services I cannot possibly use and which I do not want or need.

As advertised, Oi affirmed that the Internet service it was offering was compatible with Linux. This is not unreasonable since an Internet connection has nothing to do with the proprietary specifics of an operating system. Besides, the whole Internet is based on Unix, of which Linux — unlike Microsoft Windows — is a completely com­patible derivative. Since Oi affirmed that its service was compatible with Linux, Oi is obliged to ensure that all components of that service are Linux compatible. But un­fortunately, like Microsoft, Oi is effectively behaving like a sovereign state by charg­ing what is cynically referred to as a Windows Tax.

The notion of the Windows Tax stems from the fact that it is generally impossible to buy a computer from a "legitimate" source without it hav­ing been pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows, which, of course, is fully charg­ed for in the price of the computer.

This effectively elevates Microsoft from being a mere commercial corpor­ation to become a sovereign State with the power to charge a sales tax on other people's products. There is (purportedly) a procedure for recovering the Windows Tax from Microsoft. However the reimbursement is small and obstructively difficult to obtain.

I cringe to think of how many computers I have bought over the past couple of decades for which I have had to pay for Microsoft Windows only to immediately wipe it from the hard drive and install another operating system. For this reason, I have adopted a policy of buying my computers in component form from what are thought of as "illicit" sources.

Gross Overcharging by Oi

Oi sent me a letter stating clearly that Oi's old cable services would cease on 18 August 2015. By ceasing to provide the service on 18 August 2015, Oi thereby fact­ually terminated the contract on 18 August 2015. Consequently, without any fur­ther action by me, my contract with Oi terminated on 18 August 2015. Oi's state­ment that the service would terminate on 18 August 2015 is definitive. Whether or not Oi engineers happen to leave TV and Internet signals on the cable or fail to collect the decoder and modem from my premises after 18 August 2015 is im­material to the fact that the contract was terminated on 18 August 2015 in accord­ance with their written intimation.

Notwithstanding, events show that, because I did not actively cancel the service, Oi continued to charge me under the terminated contract for the no longer existing service, which it would apparently do unless or until I took deliberate action to cancel this no longer existing service via Anatel. My reasonable understanding from Oi's letter had been that, in the absence of any action on my part, Oi would auto­matically substitute a replacement service on or before 18 August 2015 under the same contract, which they did not do. I had to request Oi's replacement ADSL service, which was "installed" on 18 August 2015. As a result, from 18 August 2015, Oi began charging me for two parallel Internet services, only one of which was act­ually usable.

The change in my Internet service, from cable to ADSL, was forced upon me by Oi, solely for Oi's own benefit and convenience because Oi no longer wanted to pro­vide the old service Oi had bought from W@y TV. Notwithstanding, Oi overcharged me a total of R$332.84 in the process of this changeover to the inferior service. I desper­ately wanted to continue with the old superior service. Furthermore, I now have to pay an on-going charge of R$14.90 a month for separately charged addi­tional serv­ices which I do not want or need and which I cannot possibly use anyway because these services are totally incompatible with my standard Linux operating system.

The charges made to me by Oi for the period of the change-over are shown in the following table. Over-charges are shown in red.

PERIOD†	CABLE iNET	CABLE TV	ADSL iNET
July	R$62.30	R$75.24
August	R$62.27(i)	R$75.24(ii)	R$19.94(iii)	(vi)
September	R$62.35	R$75.24(iv)	R$49.89	(vi)
October	R$62.35(v)	R$75.24(iv)	R$49.89	(vi)
November			R$49.89	(vi)
Overcharge	R$150.81	R$182.03	R$14.90/month

† Month in which the service charged for was actually or supposedly rendered.

1. Overcharged by R$26.11. Charge should have been R$36.16.
2. Overcharged by R$31.55. Charge should have been R$43.69
   because Oi stated that the service terminated on 18 August 2015.
3. Included with the September period: R$19.94 + R$49.89 = R$69.83.
4. Wrongly charged: I cancelled my transfer to satellite TV service on
   27 August 2015 because of the problems with the Internet service.
5. NOTE: Internet signal not present on coax from 18 September 2015;
   TV signal not present on coax from 01 November 2015.
6. Includes overcharge of R$14.90 per month for services I cannot use.

And, of course, like NET, Oi threatens to place my name on “bad debtors” lists if I refuse to pay. So having been overcharged R$309.18 by NET plus R$332.84 + R$14.90 per month by Oi, direct personal experience has taught me that I must resign myself to the fact that it is necessary for me to accept, and make reserva­tion for, what I call a built-in corruption overhead when dealing with Internet ser­vice providers.

14 February 2016: I entered my final appeal to Anatel regarding the overcharging during the transition and the on-going charging for additional services I do not want, do not need and cannot use.

17/02/2016: 09:40 Sergio of Oi phoned. Asked for the amounts of the invoices over­charged. Said Oi would resolve the problem within 72 hours.

19/02/2016 16:25 Alessandro of Oi phoned. Said the reimbursements would be cred­ited on future bills. Mentioned R$44.76 but I didn't understand how this related.

26 February 2016 I received my telephone bill from Oi relating to the services rend­ered during February 2016. The total amount to pay was R$44.76. Now I under­stood what Alessandro of Oi was saying. This bill had been reduced by R$48.28, the amount of the Internet service, which meant that I had been effectively credited with twice that amount, namely R$96.56. This leaves a further R$236.28 of the overcharge + the R$14.90 a month for the unusable services.

My appeal to ANATEL worked, at least in part. The bill for May 2016 (see right) shows a much reduced charge of R$24.99 [US$7.60] for the Velox internet access service. Oi refused to open ports 21 FTP, 25 SMTP and 80 HTTP, con­trary to ANATEL's instructions. Notwithstand­ing, the aMule, GNUtella, G2 and Kademlia ports are all open. So although I must now make do with an inferior service, at least it is cheaper than the old W@y Internet service. And that is all I can say about it. After all, it is not really adequate for my purpose but it is apparently impossible to obtain a better ser­vice at the place where I live.

To compensate for the closed ports, I have now arranged for my HTTP and FTP ser­vers to run on a computer located in another country.

Addendum 05 January 2018

For some inexplicable reason, on this date, I noticed for the first time some external http hits in my web server's log file. On investigation, I found that Port 80 was open to the Internet. What joy! I then checked my FTP server for outside accessibility. I also discovered that Port 21 was open to the Internet. I could, as I had been doing prior to October 2015, serve my FTP essays to the world.

But how did this happen? And why now after 2½ years? Perhaps ANATEL was spot-checking old cases to see if they had been resolved, found that Oi had failed to open the ports as directed and enforced the ANATEL directive for them to do so. Alternatively, perhaps Oi installed a replacement distribution server and the engin­eer forgot to re-block the ports after setting the new server in operation. I do not suppose I will ever know.

Is it permanent? Will these ports now stay open? I can only wait and see. On 28 Feb­ruary 2018 I noticed that I was not getting outside hits to my server. I checked Port 80 and it was closed. Obviously Oi had no intention of allowing me access to serve my web pages, despite this being contrary to international recommendations. The opening of the ports on 05 January must have been a 'mistake' on Oi's part. Tea break over lads. Back on your heads!

A year later on Sunday 10 February 2019 I discovered that my eDonkey server's listening ports 4662 and 4672 were closed. Others could not make peer to peer links with me directly. Oi had shut these ports (I suppose to stop people using eMule. I had to change the listening ports to higher non-standard numbers, after which my server functioned normally again. Two months later on Friday 12 April 2019 Oi ap­peared to have engaged in a remote operation to shut all listening ports on my local modem. I had to put back the modem's port forwarding table.

Addendum Sat 03 Oct 2020

With Covid-19 still at a dangerous level, especially for old people like me, my tele­phone and Internet went dead today, leaving me without any means of communi­cation [even for emergencies]. At first, I suspected that it could well be because I had just paid a telecom services bill very 'late'. Oi had previously threatened, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, to cut my phone and reduce my Internet velocity because of 'late' payment. Oi had thus forced me, under threat, to go to the bank and queue up [in an agglomoration of other people] in order to pay its monthly bills. Happily, I did not catch the virus.

The bill was paid 29/09/2020. The declared payment deadline was 01/09/2020. But I only received the bill on 28/09/2020. Thus I paid the bill the morning after the evening I received it. There had been a postal strike during the previous month.

Notwithstanding, the lateness was not my doing and was beyond my control. So I do not see why I should be penalised; especially taking account of my age and the fact that we were in the middle of a lethal pandemic. In any case, the monthly bill from Oi usually arrives on, or one or two days after, the declared payment dead­line. I cannot see how this can be anything other than a slimy corporate trick to impose a late payment fine.

This appears to me to be a pressurising ploy to force everybody into paying by direct debit. That would be fine if corporates like Oi could be trusted. However, every time I have tried to cancel an account with a telecom services provider [TSP], including Oi, the TSP simply refuses to cancel the account, using all kinds of ex­cuses such as: "The system is down at the moment. You'll have to call back in a week's time", and so it repeats. Of course, 'the system' is always working fine if you want to open a new account. Thus, with no record that I cancelled the account, if I were on direct debit, they would continue taking money out of my account ad infinitum, unless or until I were able to mount a legal action against the corporation to cancel the account. And, of course, I have no independent material evidence that I did cancel the account. This, of course could take months or even years. Mean­while they continue to take my money.

Notwithstanding, it appears that the reason the service was cut was not to do with 'late' payment. I noticed later on Saturday 03 August 2020 that a thick cable [a 50-pair telephone Callender] was hanging down from a post about 100 metres from my home. It had been cut. The rest of the cable, which ran from this post to the building where I live, was not there any more. I can only assume that thieves must have cut the cable and stolen it. A relative reported my loss of service to Oi on Saturday 03 October 2020. He gave me the protocol number which Oi dictated to him [Protocolo 2020 1026 2968 43]. Over the next 8 days, my relative phoned Oi repeatedly and was always given the reply that service would be restored on some days it was 18h00 and on other days 21h30. The phone and Internet remained dead.

Being desperate, I ventured to use my cell phone [which I hate: the thing is too damn small for me to use reliably]. I tried to access Oi's website, having to grapple with a magnifying glass to try to decipher the ludicrously microscopic lettering. I finally managed to find a form to fill in for a complaint and request for reparation of service. However, the mandatory fields for my telephone and ID numbers would accept only 2 and 4 characters respectively. Consequently, I could not enter valid details and the site would therefore not accept my complaint. I made various other attempts to communicate with Oi but all were fraught with impassable obstacles and I had to give up. I resolved to write Oi a letter and send it by conventional post. But nowhere was I able to find Oi's postal address: only phone numbers and web sites. Even Oi's WhatsApp facility was inoperative.

Finally, on Saturday 10 October 2020, I resolved to write to ANATEL, the telecom watchdog authority. Of course, I found that they too have no postal address: only websites. I found a telephone number but that had a recorded message saying they didn't attend by telephone: only via their web site. How do you complain via a web site about the Internet being down? I should imagine that even a cretin could tell you that you can't. Eventually, with the 4G credit running low on my phone, I had to expend 6MB or more to download ANATEL's 'app' in order to register a complaint. Finally, I was getting through. However, the 'app' told me that the protocol I was given was not of the correct format. Fortunately, the 'app' accepted the complaint.

I walked the 100 metres to have a look at the post where the cable had been cut. I saw that the short length of dangling cable had been removed from the junction unit and a new black box had been fixed to the post. But my phone and Internet remained dead. Eventually, on 17 October 2020 at 15:35 the service was recon­nected. Thus, I was without service for 15 days, 12 hours, 31 minutes. Notwith­standing, when the next telephone bill [for service during the month of October] arrived [after the payment deadline, of course] it charged for the full service for the full month as if there had been no interruption. As always in Brazil, right or wrong, the weaker party pays or gets his name dirtied via that corporate instrument of extortion called Serasa Experian.

Addendum Sat 19 Oct 2021

At 12:15 the phone failed yet again. The Internet, however, continued to work, although not 100% reliably. It was not restored until 10:00 on 07 Dec 2021 — a down-time of over 50 days.

During this time, the line was very crackly and calls would drop unpredictably. Furthermore, when called, the telephone only gave a short ding and nothing more. After the ding, apparently the caller started to be charged for the call until the caller terminated his call attempt. It seems that from now on, we must accept this as a valid service. I registered on ANATEL's site that the complaint had not been re­solved in that the telephone still did not work. Oi replied that there were problems with the lines in the local area and that my line would be restored as soon as possible. Oi agreed to reimburse me for 30 days loss of service, whereas the phone was inoperative for over 50 days. Please bear in mind that I am located in a middle class inner suburb of a city of 2·7 million inhabitants within a metropolitan con­urbation of over 6 million. It appears that ANATEL do not propose to consider my complaint any further and consider it resolved. However, an Oi tech­nician arrived at my apartment at 10:00. Telephone & Internet both now working. At 10:20 Oi rang to confirm if telephone and Internet were both working.

I was told the cause of the 50-day downtime was that street cables had been stolen by copper thieves. Notwithstanding, this does not seem plausible since the Internet continued working the whole time and this would at least require a cable, albeit broken in places. Is it possible that Oi was lying?

I really wish there were a non-Brazilian telecom company with whom I could have a satellite Internet account. Satellite latency is no problem at all for me. Paying for it isn't a problem either. I just want a telecom services provider that isn't a ruthless exploitative corporate psychopath, who can display at least some degree of hum­anity and social responsibility.

Addendum July-September 2022

On 13 July 2022 I received by post an undated letter from Oi. It said that they were doing away with their current service based on copper wire and changing over to a fibre optic service. Consequently, they asked that I request migration to the new service before 03 August 2022, otherwise my service will be terminated. They said that the terms and price of my phone/internet plan would stay the same as it was. That gave me a mere 3 weeks to respond.

My immediate question is: if they want to change their cables and modem for the service to continue, why do they need me to request that they do it? Why not just do it? The change doesn't in any way affect me. They simply need to arrange a mutually convenient time to replace the old cop­per cable with a fibre-optical one and the old modem with an Optical Term­inal Unit. Why the complication of me having to request the migration?

They mentioned that the change in technology would either be from copper to fibre-optic or from copper to WLL [wireless local loop]. They said I should enter their web­site to check whether or not my particular connection needed to be changed to the new technology. I accessed this site and entered my telephone number as requested. A message appeared saying I did not need to migrate to WLL techn­ology. I can see that from this, many people would conclude that they didn't need to migrate at all.

Notwithstanding, I went on to access Oi's internet services site. The letter said I should check this site to see if a fibre optic cable were available in my street. At the top of the page was a large yellow button labelled "Consultar disponabilidade" [Con­sult availability]. I clicked on this button. I entered my CEP [postal code] as re­quested and the page displayed my address. This is a standard widget on lots of web pages for simply translating a postal code into a street address. What appear­ed was simply this. It appeared in the top left corner of the browser window. The rem­ainder of the entire browser window was blank. And it stayed blank. I switched to a different type of browser in case Oi had used non-standard propriet­ary ext­ensions which my current browser would not interpret. But the page was still blank. I have tried several times since and each time the page does not even dis­play my address when I enter the postal code.

This page verified that the postal code that I entered corresponded to my address and that I had not made any typing error while entering my postal code. But it conveyed nothing else to me. Significantly, it did not say whether or not a fibre optic service was available in my street. If a fibre optic service was available in my street, I would have expected at least to see the words: "Service available" ["Serviço fibra-óptica dispon­ivel"]. But there was nothing. Consequently I assumed that a fibre optic service was not available in my street.

So I went back to the original migration page to try to find out what I should do. I found the following:

Since the message said that I do not need to migrate to any new technology at the moment, I did nothing and naturally expected:

1. my telephone and Internet service to continue as normal

2. to be advised by Oi if and when its fibre optical service became available in my street.

But this is not what happened.

The following should be noted: Oi asserted on its web pages that in the case that fibre-optic cable or WLL were available in my locality, I must request the installation of the new technology without delay, otherwise my service would be terminated. Notwithstanding, I couldn't find any means [instructions, links or otherwise] any­where on either the "migration" page nor the "fibre optic" page of Oi's website that gave me any clue at all as to how to make that request. Nothing!! The only options available were new plans at prices way above that of my current service. So what do they expect me to do?

This is what happened:

Friday 05 August 2022

my telephone service was cut. Callers heard an automatic message saying my telephone was not receiving calls. A family member contacted Oi demanding that my service be reinstated until the fibre optical service was installed. For this, Oi required that my family member make a date for the fibre optical service to be installed. Oi arranged to install the fibre optical service in my home on the morning 17 August 2022.

Wednesday 10 August 2022

Oi reinstated the telephone service after a delay of 7 days without service. Oi charged as if the service had not been interrupted.

Wednesday 17 August 2022

The Oi installers simply didn't show up. At 11:24 that very morning, my family member contacted Oi's Artificial Imbecile, Joice asking when the installation would take place. Joice's reply was that it was not possible to install the fibre optical service at my residence at the moment and that she would schedule a date as soon as there is availability [whatever that means]. No apology.

Friday 19 August 2022

My family member messaged Joice again to arrange another date for installation. Joice's reply was that it was not possible to install the fibre optical service at my residence at the moment and that she would schedule a date as soon as there is availability. The same nebulous answer.

Wednesday 24 Aug 2022 at 12h00

An unnamed [human] woman from Oi phoned warning me that if I did not request the fibre optical service immediately then very shortly my service would be cut off. I told her installation was being scheduled by Joice "as soon as there is availability". She hung up. The subtle ambiguity in Joice's message is discussed in the detail later in this section.

That same day, my family member contacted Joice again. 'She' replied that my request for fibre optical service was open but before Oi could install the service at my residence Oi had to complete some work in the street. 'She' wanted the address and location details confirmed, which my family member did.

Monday 29 Aug 2022

My family member received a WhatsApp message from a human operative Janine saying that she was making contact to try to keep my service working. She said Oi would cut my service if I did not make a date for a technician to visit my residence this week. He told the woman that we were awaiting a message from Joice with a date for installation. She hung up immediately.

Wednesday 31 August 2022

My family member phoned Oi regarding the message from Janine. He spoke to Janine. She said she worked for Oi but did not send any such message. She told him that we would simply have to wait until Joice replied with a date for installation.

Tuesday 20 September 2022

Without warning or advice of any kind, Oi cut our phone service. Dead line.

Wednesday 21 September 2022

at 10:15 AM, again with out warning, Oi cut our Internet service. My family mem­ber phoned Oi. Joice said they would come in the afternoon on Friday 23 September 2022. To confirm this to me, my family member sent me a copy of the message he had received from Joice.

Thursday 22 September 2022

I tried to get details of my account status with Oi via my cell phone. I could not log into the 'My Oi' web page because the Oi website said that my account did not exist: there was no such account. I rigorously verified that the telephone number and CPF I entered were absolutely correct.

Thus it appeared that Oi was coming to my residence supposedly to repair a fault in a telephone service that no longer existed. On reading carefully the mess­age from Joice, I realised that what Oi arranged to do was install a brand new tele­phone line for me on the assumption that no telephone service existed at my residence. Obvious: according to the Oi website my account did not exist.

But why would Oi, who was so keen to point out that it was discontinuing copper based telephone service be coming to install what could only be a copper based telephone line? There is no sense at all in any of it.

I immediately asked my family member to cancel the installation of the new telephone line. My family member immediately cancelled the installation. Despite this, a technician from Oi arrived at my residence at 09:50 AM [not bet­ween 13:00 and 17:00 as had been arranged]. Joice [the Artificial Imbecile] had failed to expedite the cancellation. I told the Oi tech­nician I had already cancelled and told him to go away.

Saturday 24 September 2022

I entered Joice's WhatsApp channel to ask if any progress had been made with the installation of the fibre optical service in my street. 'She' asked for my CPF and phone number. I entered them. She replied that I must have made an error entering either my CPF or my phone number. I checked what I had entered. They were both absolutely correct. 'She' could not find any such account. Obviously, although she had said the installation of fibre optical service to my apartment was 'open', Oi had in the meantime closed my account completely.

Monday 26 September 2022

I received Oi's monthly bill for September by post. Oi still charged for the full month's service as if it had been operating the whole month without interruption. There was nothing on the bill that indicated that it was a final bill. It appeared in every way that my account was still active and on-going.

The Whole Fiasco In Detail

On Friday 05 August 2022, a family member phoned me via my cell phone saying that he had tried to call me on my fixed phone [land line] and simply heard a recorded voice saying that my number did not exist. I picked up my fixed phone and there was no dial tone. Then an obviously recorded female voice said: "A Telemar informa: este telefone não esta realizando chamadas. Obrigada." ["Telemar informs you: this phone is not making calls. Thank you."] As far as I can ascertain, Telemar is the former name of Oi. This was two days after 03 August 2022 — the date Oi said they would cut service if I hadn't requested the migration.

On the one hand, all information available from Oi had indicated that fibre optical cable was not available in my street and that therefore I need not request migration. On the other hand, Oi had now terminated my service as if fibre optical cable were available in my street and I had failed to request migration to the new service.

I immediately messaged another family member asking if he would contact Oi for me to ask what was going on. I assumed that Oi had assumed that I had just ignored their letter and that they had terminated the phone service on 03 August 2022 as they said they would, assuming that a fibre optic service was available in my street. After much frustration, he eventually got past all the AI virtual assistants to some­thing that seemed to pass the Turin Test as a human being. He pressured the human quite a lot, saying that it was absurd just to cut off the phone service since I am 80 years old and my wife has Alzheimer's. This contact was registered by Oi under "Protocolo 20221007479904 05 ago 2022". They reinstated the phone service [after 7 days] on 10 August 2022, but without the caller's number display service, which we originally had in order to avoid answering the torturous barrage of commercial nuis­ance calls. The internet had continued uninterrupted except for a brief period while they reinstated the phone service. Oi gave no reason for the cut.

In order to get the phone reinstated, my family member had to agenda a date for Oi to install the fibre optic service at my home. I have to assume by this that there is a fibre optic service available in my street and that their website is simply a fun­ctional mess designed by idiots. Oi arranged to install the fibre-optic cable and replace the modem with an optical network terminal [Nokia G-140W-H] on the morning of Wed­nesday 17 August 2022. They never showed. At 11h24, my family member received a message via WhatsApp from Joice, Oi's AI [Artificial Imbecile] Virtual Assistant.

"Oi! Aqui é Joice, a inteligência artificial de Oi. Desculpe, não foi possível concluir a instalação na sua residência. Agendaremos uma nova data assim que houver disponabilidade."

"Hey! This is Joice, Oi's artificial intelligence. Sorry, could not complete the installation at your residence. We will schedule a new date as soon as there is availability."

So I decided to use my wasted day to note very carefully all my modem settings in anticipation of the inevitable marathon task I am bound to have to get the whole mess working again after the new installation [assuming it ever takes place at all].

On 19 August 2022, my family member messaged Joice again. 'She' replied:

"Oi! Aqui é Joice, a inteligência artificial de Oi. Desculpe, não foi possível concluir a instalação na sua residência. Agendaremos uma nova data assim que houver disponabilidade" 16:11 19/08/2022.

"Hey! This is Joice, Oi's artificial intelligence. Sorry, could not complete the installation at your residence. We will schedule a new date as soon as there is availability" 16:11 19 August 2022.

So I suppose that we must wait for Joice to send us a WhatsApp message saying when Oi can do the installation. I notice that my itinerary is irrelevant. It is simply the case that when Oi decides to do the installation, I am required to be there. And if again the installers don't show up, that's unfortunate.

On Wednesday 24 Aug 2022 at 12h00 a woman [human] from Oi phoned. She said that if I did not ask for the new fibre optical service now, the line would be cut off and the service terminated. I told her that the AI "Joice" had said: "Hey! This is Joice, Oi's artificial intelligence. Sorry, could not complete the installation at your residence. We will schedule a new date as soon as there is availability." The woman was confused. As I was asking what was going on, she hung up. But I am still none the wiser because the wording of the message from Joice [the Artificial Imbecile] is ambiguous. Does it mean that they cannot complete the installation of the fibre optic service at my residence because:

1. They hadn't got the technicians available to do the job on the day arranged and that they will contact me with a new date when technicians become available? Or

2. There is no fibre optic service available in my street yet and that they will contact me again when they have put a fibre optic cable in my street?

My family member contacted Oi again via WhatsApp and got this automatic reply:

"Mensagem automática - Atendimento Digital da Oi. O seu pedido de Oi Fibra está aberto, mas antes vamos fazer uma obra para visibilizar a tec­nologia no seu endereço. Pra agendar a vista técnica de instalação, é preciso confirmar: Endereço: [ADDRESS HIDDEN] Complemento:- Ponto de referência:- As informações estão corretas? Responda: 1-Sim 2-Não" 16:11

"Automatic message - Oi's Digital Service. Your Oi Fibre order is open, but first let's do a job to make technology available at your address. To sche­dule the technical visit for installation, you must confirm: Address: [ADDR­ESS HIDDEN] Complement:- Reference point:- Is the information correct? Reply: 1-Yes, 2-No" 16:11

My family member replied "Sim" ["Yes"]

On Monday 29 Aug 2022 my family member received a WhatsApp message from Oi that is somewhat inconsistent with the current situation:

"Olá! Tudo bem com você? Sou Janine, Consultora de Operações da Oi. Estou entrando em contato em relação a linha fixo 55555555 no qualestá ativo junto a operadora, para manter a functionamento! A Oi não ira trabalhar mais com o cabeamento cobre, então a qualquer momento seu telefone pode ficar mudo. Estamos trabalhando apenas com Fibra Ótica [sic], que é uma tecnologia mais rápida e que não ira ocorrer inter­ferência em sua linha. Com essa troca, vamos manter o mesmo número ativo com as ligações ilimitadas para qualquer operadora do Brasil! Podermos programar a visita do técnico para essa semana?".

"Hi! Are you all right? I'm Janine, Operations Consultant at Oi. I'm getting in touch with the fixed line 55555555, which is active with the operator, to keep it working! Oi will no longer work with copper cabling, so your phone may be muted at any time. We are working only with Optical Fibre, which is a faster technology and will not allow interference on your line. With this exchange, we will keep the same number active with unlimited calls to any operator in Brazil! Can we schedule the technician visit for this week?"

Obviously, the content of this phone call is totally and utterly inconsistent with the on-going "conversation" with Oi's Artificial Imbecile, Joice. I told "Janine" about the on-going conversation with Joice and that I was waiting for Joice to message me with a date for when the fibre-optic installation could be realised. She hung up.

On Wednesday 31 August 2022 there was further confusion from Oi. my family member phoned them about the message from 'Janine'. He actually spoke to her. She said she works for Oi but that she didn't send the message. Somebody had obviously sent it in her name. Strange. We will just have to wait for Oi to make contact. It appears that they have to do some work in the street before they can install the Fibre Optical device in our apartment and we have no choice but to wait until the street work has been completed.

On Tuesday 20 September 2022 Oi cut our phone off again. I told my family member. Then, the next day at 10:15 AM, Oi cut off my Internet connection also. My family mem­ber phoned Oi. Joice said they would come on Friday. She did not give a 'Numero de Proto­colo'. She said one would sent via SMS. The SMS never came.

On Thursday 22 September 2022 I tried to get details of my account status with Oi via my cell phone. I got the response on the left. The data shown is definitely valid and cor­rect. I tried to make sense out of what Oi was doing. It was clearly schizophrenic. One of its person­alities was saying that its tech­nicians were coming tomorrow to resolve the problem. Its other personality said my ac­count did not exist: in other words, Oi must have terminated it: I no longer had an ac­count with Oi.

Thus it appeared that on Friday 23 Sep­tember 2022 between 13h00 and 17h00, Oi was sup­posedly coming to fix my line which appar­ently no longer existed. To confirm this, my family member sent me a copy of the mess­age he had received from Joice.

Then it hit me. On reading carefully the mes­sage from Joice, I realised that what they had arranged to do was install a brand new tele­phone line for me on the assumption that no line was installed at my residence. That now makes sense. The one side of Oi had cancel­led my service so I had no serv­ice. The other side of Oi had then been instr­ucted to carry out 'my request' for a tele­phone line to be in­stalled — obviously a new one. But if they're discontinuing the copper-based service and, for this reason, termin­ated my old service, why install a new tele­phone line for me? This makes no sense. I immediately asked my rel­ative to cancel the installation of the tele­phone line. My relative immediately cancelled the installation. Desp­ite this, a technician from Oi arrived at my residence at 09:50 AM [not bet­ween 13:00 and 17:00 as had been arranged]. Joice [the Artificial Imbecile] had failed to expedite the cancellation. I told the Oi tech­nician I had al­ready cancelled and told him to go away. Throughout this latest fiasco, Oi has extern­alised everything onto my shoul­ders — from having to psycho-analyse its Arti­ficial Imbe­cile to managing its inept admini­strative and technical staff. In all, Oi has de­monstrated to me the behaviour of a Great Omnipotent Cretin that has total disrespect for me as a client and appears to have no interest what­soever in keeping my custom. I think it well and truly deserves to die.

Notwithstanding, on Monday 26 September, I received Oi's monthly bill in the post. Marvellous! Unlike the other Brazilian telecom companies, Oi still, at least, provides physical paper bills. With all the utter chaos and very significant interruptions in service that had taken place Oi still charged for the full month's service. They even charged for the external services of the installer who turned up at my door to install a new [presumably copper] telephone line on Friday 23 September because the Arti­ficial Imbecile had FAILED to cancel it when requested to do so.

So I was now left in the following schizophrenic situation:

1. Joice, the Artificial Imbecile, had said that the installation of the Oi fibre optic service at my apartment was an 'open' process and 'she' would contact me when the outstanding work had been completed in the street and the Oi technicians were ready to install the fibre optic service in my apartment.

2. Janine and other human operatives, apparently, had terminated my account with Oi, had sent the final bill [which I have now paid] and nothing further is going to happen. So am I now supposed to go to another provider to buy an Internet service?

Who will prevail: Joice or Janine? I am left not knowing if, one fine day, the Oi technic­ians are going to turn up at my premises or if nothing further is going to happen. So I am now left with no Internet access and need, somehow, to find a way to get back onto the Internet. Incidentally, apart from the sporadic interruptions already detailed, this is the first time in 26 years that I have been definitively without Internet access.

IMPORTANT: Reviewing the table of service failures earlier in this essay, I think that it is perfectly fair to say that the Internet access service I have received in Brazil has so far been extremely unreliable. Of course, there is no actual law which states that I am obliged to have an active Internet connection at all times. Not­with­standing, I am, by forcible passive induction, legally obliged to have one. This is be­cause commercial corporations and other businesses now render their bills, invoices and official letters only via the Internet. Furthermore, it is only possible to interact with some govern­ment agencies via the Internet. In some cases it is nigh imposs­ible to find their postal addresses. Consequently, without an Internet connection I am factually unable to re­ceive bills, pay taxes and meet other financial impositions — as far as I have been able to ascertain. Hence I am unable to pay them because I do not know how much to pay or where. Consequently, I am placed on a public bad debtor's list on the Web, which again I cannot access. Eventually the debt collection agency will send a letter detailing the amount of my debt, grossly augmented with interest charges and fines. In the letter, I am told that in order to resolve my debt, I must enter their website, which of course, I cannot do. So I am damned every which way. I cannot function as a legally clean person in modern society without an Inter­net connection. How indigen­ous people and others in the outback manage, I don't know. So I was left with no option but to try to appeal to ANATEL again.

Appeal to ANATEL 2022

On 30 September 2022, I tried to access ANATEL on my smartphone. The smart­phone rendering to ANATEL's web­site was a mess and simply too small to read. I down­loaded the ANATEL smartphone app. Also, by some miracle, I manage to copy the PDF file containing the details of my complaint to ANATEL from my computer to my phone. But the app didn't work. It simply replied with a message in English: "Request failed with an error". Whenever I tried to enter my details, the app simply hung up. I spent hours and got nowhere. I looked on the Web via my phone's micro­scopic Web browser and managed to see that there were thousands of complaints about exactly this: the ANATEL app didn't work any more.

I contacted a friend. I asked him if he would try to access ANATEL's website on his computer. He managed. I was able to send the PDF file on my phone to him via WhatsApp. He then asked for my details as required by the ANATEL website. I sent them to him the same way. Notwithstanding, my friend was unable to register my complaint on the ANATEL website. It was not working properly. He got the same message. There was some kind of fault on ANATEL's website. We kept trying for about a week, but nothing changed. So this time I was unable to appeal to ANATEL.

Where to now? I don't know. I suppose I've reached the end of the line and will have to resign myself to the fact that Internet access is no longer possible for me, at least, not through Oi.

But what now? On Tuesday 04 October 2022, I receive an email from Oi dated 30 September 2022 confirming receipt of payment with regard to my fibre optic ser­vice. I have no fibre optic service. I had paid this bill thinking it was the final sever­ance charge from Oi. The invoice did not say what it was for specifically. It just said it was for "third party services", whatever that may mean. The email said that for more information I should touch the button labelled "Minha Oi", which I did. On the browser page that appeared I entered my CPF as requested and my password [senha]. Then a new page was displayed that was blank apart from a microscopic message, the content of which I had to guess as best I could through my magnify­ing glass. I think the message said: "Forbidden: You don't have permission to access /minhaoi/ on this server". What is this total cretin of a company up to now? For me, it is completely impossible to communicate with this company. And with ANATEL not functioning there is nothing further I can do. I am now 'off the air'.

On Friday 07 October 2022 I discovered that ANATEL no longer handles consumer complaints and that I must send my complaint about Oi to 'consumidor.gov.br'. I have doubts whether the stupid extremely-difficult-to-use phone actually sent the PDF file. I must now wait for an email response and hope that somehow I will be able to parse some sense out of its microscopic print, which I doubt.

On Sunday 09 October 2022 at 08:30, I managed [with great difficulty] to actually get the appallingly designed 'consumidor.gov.br' app to send the file Oi2022.pdf to ac­com­pany my complaint.

At 11h06 Tuesday 11 October 2022 a man from Oi phoned [0031980367865] about the complaint I made through the site 'consumidor.gov.br'. I said that in view of the unworkable delay without Internet, I had to take on the service of another provider. I could not really understand much of what he was saying because of the distortion of the telephone connection. But it seemed that he under­stood that I was cancelling the service of Oi: a service that did not exist because Oi had already terminated the service a month ago. My telephone number no longer existed. Oi's AI said that no account existed in my name and I was forbidden from logging in the 'MinhaOi'. So what could I have been cancelling?

Making any sense out of Oi was impossible. I therefore signed up with Blink for a fibre optical Internet service. On 11 October 2022, Blink technicians arrived. They looked at the cabling in the building and concluded that it was impossible to install fibre optics because there was absolutely no space available in the entry ducts of the building for telecommunications cables. They cancelled my contract. So, clearly, Oi would not have been able to install a fibre optic service for me anyway. It would only have been an act of mere common decency for Oi to have verified this before cutting off my service on 03 August 2022.

Though Oi has, in my opinion, by far the best technology available with the fibre optic service and the Nokia OTU, their customer administration is the most appall­ing ex­ample of off-handedness, bad manners and imbecilic disorganisation that I have ever encountered in my life. Oi has also charged me as if there has been con­tinuous service without interruption up to the end of September 2022, for which I have already paid.

At 15h37 on Thursday 13 October 2022, Oi sent me a WhatsApp message saying that its Fibre Optic service was now available at my residence and made various offers of service. Obviously, I knew it was a lie because there was no means of run­ning a fibre optic cable into the building.

At 19h40, I decided to send additional texts to Oi via the 'consumidor.gov.br' web­site about the fact that in a middle class district of a city with a conurbation of 3 million people, three major ISPs: Oi, Claro and Blink didn't have the will or capability to provide me with an Internet connection of any kind. It was obvious that they were incapable of connecting the packaged 'combos' they were pushing of up to 500 Mbps. But they couldn't or wouldn't even supply me with a 4G residential con­nection of 20 Mbps or so. Not even a simple 1 Mbps duplex connection to look at my emails and upload my files.

By physically terminating my service on 03 August and then finally on 21 Sept­ember, Oi rendered me digitally excluded. There was nothing to stop them leaving the old copper based service functional until their fibre optic service was capable of sub­stituting it.

Law no. 12.965 of April 23, 2014 CHAPTER II, USERS’ RIGHTS AND GUAR­ANTEES, Art. 7. Internet access is essential for the exercise of citizenship, and the user is guaranteed the following rights: ... IV – maintenance of Inter­net connection, unless it is terminated due to the user’s failure to pay for its use;

But Oi didn't maintain my Internet connection even though I had paid my bills up to date and on time. Oi just cut my signal. Oi 'burned the bridge' of the old tech­nology of my service long before the new technology had the capability of substi­tuting it. Oi simply left me high and dry with no Internet connection. That is, in my opinion, the absolute height of flagrant and contempt­uous irresponsibility towards me, the customer. It is the epitome of catastrophic bad man­agement of a move from an old technology to a new one. On Oi's original migration page there had appeared the following:

Caso não solicite a migração de seu telefone fixo pra tecnologia WLL, num prazo de 30 dias, a partir da data do comunicado em jornal em sua região, você terá a cobrança do serviço suspensa e o seu serviço de banda larga e telefonia fixa bloqueados e, após 60 dias, será realizado seu cancelamento. Caso possua também o serviço de banda larga base­ado em cobre (Velox), este serviço será descontinuado em até 60 dias, conforme previsto no contrato de adesão do serviço.

Ignoring the fact that all indications given on their migration web page showed that I didn't need to move to the new technology, the above text threatens that if I didn't request migration in time, Oi would simply cut my service after 60 days ac­cording to a provision in Oi's contract of service.

I must therefore assume that in Brazil, a clause in the small print of an ISP's contract of service [which a user has no power to delete or change] overrides rights that are granted to that user under a Federal Law.

At 12:26 on Friday 14 October 2022 a man called Anderson from Oi telephoned me [0031980367865] about my complaint via 'consumidor.gov.br'. I explained to him the whole story from July 2022. I think that he understood. It appeared to me that he hadn't read the PDF document I sent with the complaint. He said he would call back. He didn't call.

There didn't appear to be any telecom company serving my area that was able or willing to get me back on the Internet. So if you think Brazil is in the digital age, think again. The problem isn't technology. The problem is to do with the unerring quest to maximise commercial profit to the total exclusion of social responsibility. Arbitrary selective digital exclusion is alive and well in one of Brazil's largest cities.

The legal implications for me of my digital exclusion are legion. I have no Internet con­nection but today's government and commerce expects me — nay, requires me — to have Internet access. Much of commerce now only renders bills and invoices via the Internet. If I do not respond to them or pay them, my name is placed on the Serasa-Experian publicly visible bad debtors list. Many official documents and notices are now sent only via the Internet: backups are no longer sent by normal post. The ramifications of my digital exclusion are therefore very serious for me.

The response from Oi did not have any meaning for me and did not seem to addr­ess my complaint in any way, let alone solve it. So I terminated my complaint about Oi on the website 'consumidor.gov.br' as 'unresolved'.

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© August 2015 to October 2022 Robert John Morton

[1] I was not the ISP's actual customer, that was somebody else, who subscribed to the service on my behalf. However, throughout this essay, for clarity of prose, the first person singular has been used to indicate either or both of us. The other per­son has no knowledge, involvement or responsibility regarding any of the content of this monograph essay.

[2] Within this essay, an open port is a TCP or UDP port number that is configured to accept unsolicited incoming IP packets. An open port in this sense is also known as a listening port.