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Who the hell blocks port 80?

Several Cable and DSL providers do. Google "blocking port 80" and you can find some names pretty fast. Whether they actually block it or not the majority ban it via their TOS. Most reserve the right to automatically bump you to a commercial account or simply disconnect you. Examples:

Charter's policy - "Customer may not establish a web page using a server located at Customer's home. Customer will not use, or allow others to use, Customer's home computer as a web server, FTP server, file server or game server or to run any other server applications or to provide network or host services to others via Charter's network." and "Charter reserves the right to disconnect or reclassify the Service to a higher grade or to immediately suspend or terminate Service for failure to comply with any portion of this provision or this Policy, without prior notice."

Verizon's Policy - "3.6.5 You may not use the Broadband Service to host any type of server personal or commercial in nature."If, in the sole discretion of Verizon: (a) you are in breach of any of the terms of this Agreement (including but not limited to) all policies regarding abuse and acceptable use of the Service)... then Verizon at its sole election may terminate or suspend your Service immediately without notice."

You also agree to pay any service fees or equipment charges and, assuming they allow you to have DSL again, agree you might be charged fees for giving back your service.

If you live in an area with only those two broadband providers (a surprisingly large portion of america) then what do you do if you want to run a personal web server with a fast CPU and a lot of RAM? Or if you want to host your own domain for non-commercial purposes on a server like that. Do you pay 2-3 times more for a "commercial" account? Even though you will actually be using 1/10th the total bandwidth as the kid next door who plays online games?

They insisted that the smyrnacable.net mail servers did not belong to them, and told me to contact Smyrna Cable. I patiently explained that Smyrna Cable no longer existed because they had devoured it. Apparently it was escalated to somebody with a clue, because a few days later my account was closed.

Months passed and the matter was forgotten. Until one day, some company in Smyrna emailed me. They'd found my old resume on my old site and wanted to know if I was interested in a job. Sure enough, my old site was back! Maybe somebody restored a backup or something. I went through the whole process again, only this time Charter's tech support denied even more vehemently that smyrnacable.net does not belong to them (despite the fact that it's among the choices on their Webmail page!)

I finally gave up on the. I meditated until I remembered my old FTP password, and replaced my personal Web site with the above story (suitably embellished) and a challenge to Charter Cable to permanently remove it. I then emailed the URL to tech support. Needless to say, the page came down most ricky-tick.

http://www.chartercom.com/aboutus/ourstory/ourstor y.asp

"Years ago, Charter Communications Chairman Paul Allen envisioned a Wired World - a global broadband network that would interconnect every home, facilitating the convergence of television, computers, the Internet and communications.

Today, Paul Allen is Charter's largest shareholder. And with interests in more than 100 other world-class enterprises and investments dedicated to improving the way people live, learn, do business, and experience the world, he and his portfolio companies are creating a Wired World."

Charter Communications fucking BLOWS and SUCKS. Their website says I can get 1.5Mbit cable. I called them up and they said it's not available here. But their god damned website says plainly it's available in my town. EAT SHIT, CHARTER.

The franchise agreement for the cable company in my town (Falcon Cable in Beebe, Arkansas) expires in October. A few weeks ago, I walked into city hall and got a copy of the proposed 10-year franchise renewal.

I asked the mayor and city attorney to insert some language for two things: high-speed two-way Internet service and "transfer of control". They did that and Falcon has apparently agreed to the changes. If it works out, I think this will be the first non-municipally owned cable modem system in Arkansas.

It helps that Falcon is going to be bought by Charter Cable (Paul Allen) next month. (Big IPO coming soon!)

I don't expect the telco (Southwestern Bell) to arrive with xDSL for five years - and by then, the cable companies will have already cornered the market for high speed access.

So for those of you waiting for cable modem service in your town, get a copy of your cable company's francise agreement and find out when it expires. Familiarize yourself with Title 47 of the U.S. Code, the FCC Cable Bureau, etc., and start negotiating about a year before the franchise agreement expires. Also see NATOA for additional resources and negotiating strategies.

Little Rock is considering a publicly-owned SONET loop for high-speed Internet around the county for $100 million. It's obviously a boondoggle, but that has never stopped the idiots in Little Rock before.

For about three years, I've been using cable modems in another nearby town (Conway, Arkansas) to host my Internet servers. The city-owned Conwaycorp.net works great and has a very liberal policy about static IPs - but they filter ICMP packets. That makes it difficult to do diagnostics.

My $.02 on Cable service, @Home, and other stuff that came to mind when reading the summery:
Around here I hate the cable company. And I have a good reason why. Cable modems around here really stinks since Charter+ Earthlink caps the upload at 56 KBPS *AND* download rate at 256 KBPS unless you pay more. See the cable section on http://www.earthlink.net for more information on this or click here. Suddenly @Home doesn't look as bad. Well, I guess that's what you get when your cable system is owned by the cofounder of Micro$oft AKA Paul Allen. I wonder what the cable system would be like if it was run by the Woz. Well, that's my $.02. Thanks for listening!
-Luther Sloan (Mkennedy3@SPAMTRAP.aol.com)
P.S. Remove the SPAMTRAP from my address to E-Mail.

USR has slimy sales practices in general and their hardware (except for the Palm Computing series) is not all that great either. 3Com modems/NICs are fine for consumption by the general masses but for anyone who wants to do the slightest thing nonstandard with them, they're out of luck.

At home I have a 3Com VSP cable modem (internal ISA card) which is basically the cable equivalent of a Winmodem (and seeing as how Paul Allen owns my cable company, Charter Communications it almost makes sense why). Tried every hardware hack possible to make it work, but it doesn't. My Cable Co. hopefully will have an external multiplatform modem soon, or so they tell me, but until now I'm stuck with using it the way 3Com makes me.

At work I was working on a 2x450 PII Linux machine last week with a 3Com NIC which refuses to cooperate with our network. Did a clean install of Linux, nothing nonstandard or weird in the hardware or software. I'm sure the thing works flawlessly under WinNT but under Linux it occasionally stops talking to our Sun NIS and NFS servers and is just really flaky in general.

I can't knock the Palm series though - love my Palm III....