UPDATE: December 2008, at last, I can now access these pages from the Sussex campus.

I’ll keep this short. For several years now, trying to access any information about Tesco broadband from the University of Sussex network have resulted in Tesco’s servers showing ‘Permission denied’ messages. (click image to see larger version, shows Tesco’s Broadband page in Opera and Lynx, the latter from a server across campus).

Before you ask, I’ve tried different computers, different browsers, and accessing it in different ways, and no, I don’t do anything fancy with my browser setup. I’ve tried it on several computers but all within the same building, but as our web requests go via a central proxy I do not think it should be any different across campus. The message is coming from the Tesco servers, a message from our central proxy servers would appear differently.

I contacted Tesco back in April 2006 but came to a dead end: email one explained problem clearly saying when it happened, reply one said “If you go to http://www.tesco.net and then click on the ‘Internet Access@ tab you will be able to obtain information regarding all of our internet access packages. “. Email two thanks them for their helpful reponse (!) and explained that I followed their instructions and the same thing was happening, I also told them that I had tried different computers and cleared my cache (both trying to show I wasn’t stupid and predict their next move). Reply two asked me to ensure my cookies were on. Email three from me said my cookies were, and then it went quiet and no more were heard from them. I guess passing it on to their web team was just somethnig they did not have an option to do, support centres often seem powerless to handle unusal things or pass things on to the anyone in the rest of the company, which always seems bad business sense to me, my query after all was basically a pre-sales query, this is the time you are meant to at least try to look like you are compentent and value your customers.

I mentioned this briefly in another post a while back, and the only thing I could come up with is that we are www.suSEX.ac.uk (i.e. they block access from sites with suposed ‘naughty’ words in them), but just can’t believe this could be the case. Plus, our IP addresses resovle to susx.ac.uk (the orignal Sussex domain) so it looks even less likely.

So, is anyone else blocked from https://register.tesco.net/online (you can try going to http://www.tesco.com/telecoms/ and clicking on ‘Internet Access’ instead)? Or can everyone else access this fine?

Any one have any ideas?