Problem in accessing Apple sites

Since a while to date, I have been experiencing access error to some Apple sites: such as www.apple.com, helposx.apple.com and stream.qtv.apple.com. Funny thing is that the accessibility to www.apple.com is quite occasional. Sometimes it's OK, and sometimes it's NG. A couple of months ago, I'd finally discovered that 17.149.160.xxx addresses generate this problem.

The IP address of "www.apple.com" changes frequently under the control of round robin DNS. When 17.112.152.32 is assigned to it, the connection is well, however, 17.149.160.10 is assigned, it ends up with a time out. "helposx.apple.com" is at 17.149.160.23, and "strem.qtv.apple.com" is at 17.149.160.19, permanently. They are not reachable, anytime.

Strange thing is that those servers are reachable from the terminals located outside of NAT.

I was not able to see Phil Schiller's keynote streaming from my Mac Pro inside of NAT, however, the quicktime player on the OS X server which connects to the outside of NAT was able to monitor. What's the hell happening!

I collected information by the keyword "17.149.160.10" to find that owners of a certain router were encountering the similar trouble. According to "http://apple2.blog.so-net.ne.jp/2007-10-24", there are two reasons: 1) the firmware of the router is old,
2) the apple server doesn't support HTTP 1.1. Wow, is it true?

the story continues....