Slashdot Mirror
Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers?
David Hansen asks: "I want to see what problems other Slashdot users have had with @Home restricting their service. We all know that they block the SMB ports, and probably for good reason. But did you know that they won't let you access certain other machines on the @Home network? And why don't they mention any of this in their acceptable use policy? My mother and father are both @Home subscribers in the same city (different subnets). I have Linux boxes acting as firewalls in both places which cannot ping or otherwise contact each other. I can ping them both from an outside location. I discovered this and the SMB thing the hard way. What else doesn't @Home want us to do? Do other ISPs do this also? BTW, I can reach @Home users who are in other cities." I've noticed that ISPs have been filtering lots of ports in the event that users will put up servers. Do you feel that ISPs should make a list of ports that they filter available to their customers?
I am in Australia, and the broadband providers here have even more restrictions. You can only connect two other machines via NAT, no servers, etc. Why can't we have a internet service that says "here's your IP number, here's 1.5 mb/s down and 0.5 mb/s up, do whatever you want with it". Somehow I don't think that is going to happen. What we need is a totally free and noncommercial internetwork for the people. You would just share the costs. 10 or 15 100BaseT cables along the streets. I have heard of some small towns doing this. Anyone got the URLS? David Findlay nedz@bigpond.com
The single biggest restriction: transfer rate caps. 1.5-2 years ago, my transfer rates peaked at 10Mb in / 5Mb out; these days it's usually 1-2Mb in / .012Mb out. The worst part is that that 12KB cap is a hard limit; while the only server I ever ran (back when they allowed you to I had my personal web and email servers) probably transfered 5MB per day, I used to really like the ability to transfer large (10-100MB) files between home and work.
They've thrown away the huge lead over the DSL providers they used to have in San Diego; on the bad days the service feels worse than ISDN. I'd switch if anyone else offered service in my area.
Amazingly, they even enforce that 12KB/s cap on outbound transfers for business accounts. Pay them $300/month for a connection and you can get *twice* the performance of your old modem.
I'm just amazed nobody has realized that arbitrary restrictions annoy people. My mail or web server probably use several orders of magnitude less traffic than a single person playing something like Quake online.
Rather than whining about people running MP3/porn/warez servers and annoying all of the people who weren't abusing things, they could just set a daily or monthly transfer limit beyond which you'd need to switch to a different service plan. That's the really amazing thing - there's no way to remove the cap or get it set higher short of switching to another ISP. You'd think they would be interested in a way to get people to pay more for service they can easily deliver.