Broken FTP

Sometimes FTP (from the command line) doesn't work on the mac. It just hangs. This drove me mad for a while, for example when uploading to my ISP (PlusNet). It usually says something like

229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||4169|)

Then I found this post by Dave Taylor. It seems that all you have to type is epsv

ftp> epsv
EPSV/EPRT on IPv4 off

Who knew?