WIND Mobile “fixes” blocked port issue… customers happy again

So if you signed up with Wind on their “Infinite Mobile” data plan you might have realized that they unknowingly blocked ports, basically stopping you from accessing and using popular sites and apps like YouTube), MSN, Google Talk or GPS.

There has been much discussion on the Wind Mobile site with the title “***Dear WIND Please ADMIT that you’re blocking ports, and work quickly to end it!***”. WIND does stand behind their tag line of “the power of conversation” as they we getting slammed by their community. With this COO Chris Robbins has stepped up and as usual communicated every step of the way about resolving the unknown issue.

He stated: “High level, there was no plot to limit specific applications. The decisions we’ve made up until now were essentially for 3 reasons:
1. To differentiate between our two unlimited data plans (one is for “mobile internet” on your phone, and one is for laptops). For most customers, these are different uses and have different value.
2. To optimize the customer experience on each of those plans to best suit the vast majority of customers using them.
3. To protect our network. The reality is that we’re the first operator in Canada to launch unlimited data. There are stories from around the world about how this can negatively affect network integrity, security and capacity issues and that’s not good for us, or for our customers.

Those are all valid reasons for managing our ports and applications, but we also did miss some things and we focused on the “average” customer, rather than all of our customers. So we’ve made changes.

We’ve added real time video streaming (although the Technical guys told me I couldn’t ask how they did it!), SIP, VOIP, SSH, and VPN… in fact, most letters of the alphabet now are supported. However, we haven’t been able to get video streaming to work on the BlackBerry Bold 9700. We’re still working on that one, and we’ll let you know when it happens.

What does the updated Infinite Mobile service look like? It’s essentially for people using their mobile phone to access the internet. That means that it’s optimized for mobile applications, mobile websites/internet and mobile email.

Here’s the full list (get even more detail in our FAQs):

• Email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, …)
• Streaming (new)
• Consumer applications like Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, VOIP, Fring, Skype, Jabber, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Fring, … plus whatever other consumer applications to come!
• Other access / applications added today like SIP, SSH, VPN, FTP

While there are new mobile applications all of the time, we’re pretty confident that they’ll work with what we’ve got, and – if not – we’ll fix it. Just let us know!