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Cable Co's Want More Control Over Your Network
Moonshine Coward writes: "'The CAT and the NAT' in latest issue of www.cedmagazine.com discusses Cable labs and their efforts to come up with a 'better' protocol than NAT that allows them more control over devices behind your cable modem. Their upside on this...$4.95 per IP per mth.
Their #1 concern...people putting in 802.11b hubs and sharing with their neighbors.
Fine in principle and if it gets them drooling enough to speed up the deployment of fiber to the home it might be a good thing. However I can see way too many downsides...not least of which is being nickled and dimed to death..my webcam, cable ready microwave, refrigerator, pictureframe that shows revolving jif's ... each costing me $4.95 p.m. -- all on top of regular $39.95 cost." Note: the article is written from an interesting point of view -- it's aimed at the people who want to collect the additional per-IP charges.
"Illegal bandwidth sharing." I pay a certain amount for bandwidth and a single IP from a provider. What I do with that connection and single IP is my own business as long as I'm not using my connection in a detrimental way to others, as stated in their Acceptable Use Policy. How is sharing my bandwidth, which appears to them to be all the same source, and technically is, illegal?
Spinning containers of peanut butter?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The cable and dsl companies manage to keep their service poor enough that I doubt an entire neighborhood would want to get taken out cause Mr. smith's cable modem went down :)
Is that 4.95 to the consumer. If that is the cost to consumer think how this could wipe out DSL, Dial Up and anything else access wise. Most Semi Small cities are still charging 17.95 a month for dial up. And Dsl is upwards of 49.95 a month in these same cities.
--
FearLinux.com
Jif files: The image file format with sticky bits and a creamy, nutty flavor.
pictureframe that shows revolving jif's
Revolving peanut butter? Cool. Mine doesn't have ethernet, is there an upgrade I can get?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Funny I just got an email from my provider saying (Adelphia.net) that my area (Vermont) won't be involved in a recent price hike because service around here has sucked lately... (Which they apologized profusely for, and thanked us for our patience...)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
What relevance does the number of devices behind the cable modem have? The reality is that the real load on their system is gross throughput, and if there really is a problem of abusers then the natural solution will be in the realm of additional bandwidth costs: Joe will be a lot less likely to set up a 802.11 network if it costs him $5 / GB past 5GB or whatever.
As a bit of perspective here: I hope they didn't have to do any of this, but the reality is that the "honest" among us end up paying when people abuse these sort of commercial services : i.e. they price based upon the requirements to support the average Joe's bandwidth, so when BillyBob opens up his cable modem to 10Mbps with SNMP and then sets up a warez FTP site and shares his connection with his apartment complex, then that ends up cost ME more in the long run (or alternately, and worse, the service is withdrawn entirely because it isn't economically viable).
Is getting infected with a script kiddie's DDoS backdoor 'illegal bandwidth sharing?'
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
Why not set up a gateway/proxy that dolls out IPs internal to your network? I can't imagine them actually being able to talk their way past personally installed firewalls.
(Well, okay, the real argument is probably that the providers see a way to make more money but....)
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
Since it is shared bandwidth you can only use what is available in the pipe and there is not limiting factor besides how many people share the pipe with you. So, if you set up a wireless netwoek and a whole bunch of people are suck up the bandwidth of the pipe through your, the other customers and the cable co. lose out.
I can see their side but as usual the wrong people will get punished.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
Can't one always be able to set up a hub to forward traffic from a LAN to the outside world with detection being almost impossible no matter what protocols the cable company use?
It doesn't seem to make any sense to me... Why doesn't the cable company just limit bandwidth? That seems like the fare thing to do...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
The article talks about going through the NAT router to "count" the devices hooked up behind it... How could they manage that without a client software install? Sounds like vaporware to me.
They claim that sharing your cable-modem connection with your neighbors via 802.11b is illegal. Aren't you paying for bandwidth at a fixed rate? Why should they be able to mandate what you have on the other end of the line. Business providers certainly don't care how many machines (or what type) you have at the other end of their T1 or T3. I suppose the real question is what is in the service agreement you have with them. It seems really slimy to me to restrict how you use your bandwidth. Why can't the ISPs just treat bandwith as a commodity instead of being restrictive on their customers?
The article is a cable modem provider rant against NAT. It mentions CAT two or three times, and glosses over any technical details.
The proposed CAT doesn't sound like it breaks NAT but simply replaces it (or works with some sort of enhanced NAT). As long as folks have a way to run a NAT service (i.e., running a Linux router behind the cable modem), the "nightmare scenario" of bandwidth sharing won't be stopped other than through bandwidth usage monitoring, which can be done now.
CAT might be helpful to manage sanctioned home-networking schemes, but it won't solve the problem the article addresses.
Cable companies currently cannot charge per TV. How could charging per IP be any different? Also, should I have to pay for my iron's IP address if it never browses the web? Heck, why do they need to know ANYTHING about my home's network.
Sigs are for naught.
from the article:
"What's the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one. Let's say one in 10 of the 5 million U.S. cable modem subscribers are usurping IP addresses without paying the $4.95 per month fee that's typically charged (beyond a pre-specified limit, which varies MSO to MSO.) Right off that bat, that's just shy of $30 million lost, annually."
I've never ran an ISP, so i'm not familiar with how IP addresses are doled out to the "big" guys. Interesting that they calculate the "losses" at $5.00 a month.
A long time ago, weren't different classes of IP addresses handed out for free? How does one put a price on these things?
Furthermore, i thought there was a shortage of IP addresses now. If they're going to implement some funky $5.00/month additional IP charge, i actually wonder if these IPs are going to be routable ones, or an IP on some cheezy intranet, unaddressable to the outside world (as if the cable companies were themselves NATting the connection for you from your private $5.00/month address.)
This article is a misleading justification of price gouging. "The good news is, the dishonest people who know how to do it are already doing it..."; clearly anyone with two computers must be a dishonest thief.
They discuss sharing amongst neighbors, but what they are really upset about is not being able to charge for every device I own or sharing amongst roommates. Nowhere is the fact that even toasters are getting IP addresses mentioned, and none of the technology they are looking forward to will allow the provider to differentiate between my toaster and my neighbor's computer.
So the interesting question to me is, why does my service provider deserve more $$$s because I own three computers, a net-connected TiVo, and an internet enabled toaster or stoplight? Aren't they still just providing me a single connection and some bandwidth? What right do they have to charge for my toaster? Do they have a contract with *me*, or with *my device*? They seem to think they are providing my computer with a service; I happen to believe my computer can't sign a contract, so the service is provided to me, and this price gouging shouldn't be allowed.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
the cable companies will take over the world with microsoft being the leader....
Natural-Selection Be
I'd like a little more concrete numbers there. ANYBODY can pick a number and make a horrific sounding cost analysys out of it. It's a lot like saying 'A CD costs $17, and a DVD costs $19, therefore, all that video and extra features only costs two bucks!'
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Would they be targeting those of us IP Masquerading our boxes behind firewalls? I am running 3 machines behind my firewall using IP Masq and IP forwarding to avoid the additional IP address per machine that ATT Broadband already charges on top of the 50 bucks a month.
Bandwidth. It's "business" when they restrict its features and sell it to you. It's "theft" when you use it for your own purposes.
I don't see how they will make more money at 4.95/user than charging one user 40 bucks a month. For this to make sense, the average subscriber would have to let 10 people bleed off his connection. ( well maybe 5 or 7 since the single user wouldn't use as much bandwidth as 10 people would if they were sharing ) but I'm willing to bet that 90% of people don't share their connection outside their household, and that the ones that do usually share with one or two neighbors tops.
The other day I went to my brother's house with my laptop. I couldn't remember a few commands to release and renew my IP address for some reason so I decided to call Road Runner tech support. For those that don't know, Road Runner is a cable modem service provided on a franchise basis by companies such as Time Warner.
In any event, they were slow but helpful. I noticed during the help call they asked a million silly questions that had nothing to do with my issue. The call should have taken about 2 minutes but it actually took about 8-10 minutes because of these questions (e.g., What is the brand of your cable modem?, What is the serial number on your cable modem?, When is the last time you called us?, and so forth). These questions were asked after I got the command that I needed. It was actually painful to get the guy off the phone. He wanted to check and verify basically the entire setup of my brother's computer and cable connection.
Now, I don't know about you, but this kind of thing really rubs me the wrong way. It isn't support. And, despite what many companies think, it is not Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It is 100% hassle. I am pretty sure this kind of "support" is used to control users and ultimately squeeze more money out of them.
On the one hand, I am not happy about this kind of user support. On the other hand, I am glad that I can even get a good high speed connection. It does cost more than dial up, but it is worth it to me given my career. In any event, I really wish there was more competition. I don't have a choice but to suck it up and quietly complain on Slashdot.
How to Download YouTube Videos
From the article:
Just as, to some, "take one" always means "take three," and "contribution appreciated" always means "free," so can the bandwidth of a legal cable modem subscription become wirelessly shared among neighbors.
Just like, to some corporations, "free market" means "unfair dominance" and "fair price" means "whatever the market will bear"
This is a good time to be a cable provider. Eventually, wireless networks will be extensive enough to render the wire services redundant. The threat isn't using a wireless hub to *extend* a cable/DSL connection. It's using multiple transcievers to *replace* the hardwired connection.
The cable companies are just looking for a juicier revenue model. Instead of just charging for a throttled piple of bandwidth, they want to add a fixed monthly cost per device behind the cable modem. And good luck convincing them that your house-guest's laptop is no longer hooked up.
What's next? An IR sensor on the settop box that counts the number of people in the living room and adjusts your bill accordingly ("Billy! Get Rover out of the living room before the cable company charges us!")
Remain calm! All is well!
That is such fucking bull shit, NAT is NOT stealing, if the user is consuming too much bandwidth, charge them for it. We should have IPV6 by now.
Anybody have any experience with this service? I've had it for a couple weeks now and have violated a couple major points in their TOS so far.
They say 2.5 GB per month, I managed to reach that in the first 3 days. They say no running of servers of any kind, I'm running Apache (only allowing specific IP addresses though), VNC, and SQL Server which I've since modified to only listen on the loopback, for security purposes, not adelphia.
So has anybody gotten their wrist slapped by these guys, or worse, had their service shut off for similar violations?
If someone is going to charge for an IP, I expect it to be static and to be able to specify a reverse DNS lookup. Think they'll go for that? Bet not!
How long is it going to take before ISPs start realizing that Internet Service Provider means Internet Service Provider? I just want a pipe with some bandwidth, to use as I want. This seems a simple enough notion, but the ISPs are all into "we'll sell you a piece of a pipe, as long as you don't use it much, and not for things we don't like."
Clue to ISPs: Sell the pipe. Don't worry about what goes through it unless you're sitting on a subpoena or something. Everything else is silly optional garbage.
--G
I used to work for a cable modem ISP (until they went out of business last January). People sucking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth on "consumer" accounts were a huge drain on our resources. Usually it was spammers or people running high volume websites at home, but we also had a few folks with as many as 30 computers on one cable modem. We were only charging them $50 a month, but they were eating up almost an entire T1 all by themselves. Losing $1000 a month to one customer is not a good way to stay in business.
It got so bad in one area we actually started putting together a database of MAC addresses, trying to map them to individual customers (even with NAT, the MAC address of the original computer is in the packet). Unfortunately, that project was just starting when the company filed for bankruptcy.
That said, an easier and more effective solution would be to put QOS restraints on people. Who cares how many devices are hanging off one network connection? It's the bandwidth they're using that's important. And if bandwidth were limited to cable modem customers they wouldn't be so eager to share what they have with all their neighbors.
Cory
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
NAT hides all the extra computers on your network. The cable company has no way of knowing if you're using NAT or not. They try to sell this service that they support. They claim it stops bootlegging of bandwidth.
Fact: those who are bootlegging will never buy it
Fact: those who are bootlegging will never be found, unless a physical inspection is made.
Fact: Most cable providers permit the use of NAT, they just don't offer support.
So really, they've invented a useless technology which only serves to make money off those who are dumb enough to buy it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
As long as I'm not violating their Acceptable Use Policy, and I'm not overly burdening the network, what goes on behind my cable modem should not concern them.
There are legitimate reasons for sharing over 802.11.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
This is just unbelievable. The whole idea of NAT is to hide the actual number of IP addresses behind the NAT box. There is no way the cable company can detect that I am running NAT from their side of things - the most they might be able to do is require me to run a program on my PC that they can talk to in order to interrogate what my PC thinks its IP address is. And since I don't run Windows, I wouldn't be their customer.
It's all about bandwidth - if you sell me 10MB/sec and you don't put any other limits on it, then more fool you! If you throttle me, either by limiting my peak bandwidth or by limiting my max transfers per month, then you don't care how many devices I have behind the firewall.
Gods and Daemons, am I glad I have a sensible ISP that doesn't care what I do with my 384Kb/sec.
www.eFax.com are spammers
From the same people who thought you should pay a per-tv fee for cable. Duh, what else would they want? Cable-ready TVs ate into their box rental revenues. Ever wonder why they want you to move to digital cable so badly? That 4.95/month box rental of course! It's all a scam. "We'll rent you the cable modem for $4.95/month, or sell it to you for $300". Bleh. I'm so sick of monthly fees. The holy grail of all software companies is the same thing - that big $19.95 monthly fee in the sky. Sick sick sick. Everyone should use free software.
to all my neighbors houses. I have 4 neighbors all splitting my one DSL line, blue wire running along all the fences.
My main argument here is from the wire hookup on the outside of my house to the wire running to my neighbor house is all my property. I paid for it, I maintain it, I own it. Sure they're using bandwidth, BANDWIDTH I PAID FOR!!! So it comes to reason that if I pay $39.95@mo for 384 down and 128 up that i'm paying for bandwidth.
Also to note, my ISP does not handle the squid proxy, they do not do the DNS cache, or any of the other network services I provide, they don't even provide support for my neighbors. You know what? This has me so pissed if I don't stop now i'm itching to turn this into a -1 flamebait post of mighty vulgarities. It's wrong, it's bullshit and I think they're just trying to find yet another way to screw us.
It may stop some broadband sharing devices but it cannot stop people who use physical computers as gateways. For instance, I use Win2k in the main internet computer, it has two NIC's. I simply tell win2k to share the Net NIC with the LAN NIC. Any NT5/*nix system can do this with ease, how are they going to stop it?
I agree with you 100% - I've got multiple computers (all mine, all in my house) and a PDA that connect to the internet via 802.11. Evidently I'm a dirty-rotten scum-sucking rat bastard too, even though I rarely have more than one device on line at a time.
Although I don't understand exactly how NAT works, I thought part of the idea was the net on the other end couldn't tell you were doing it...?
The point that cable providers seem to miss, is that I am paying for 10 MB/s, and 90% of the time I'm using 1/100th of that(when I'm idle). I should be refunded for that, or because I seriously doubt Adelphia is going to give me a refund, I should take the bandwidth that is allocated me. We all should resell our unused bandwidth to our neighbors, this way, we get are truly using what we pay for.
Not to mention, Adelphia claims they don't have a 'level of service' that is required to be met. I have had many 8 or 12 hour outages, and when I complain, they say that I am not entitled to 100% uninterrupted service. I say bull. I'm paying a monthly fee, if the service is only there for 98% of the time, what makes them think I don't deserve to be compensated?
I do not want it in my box.
Not on my hard drive's precious blocks.
I do not need it in my house.
I will not click it with my mouse.
My packets fly throughout the air,
I use my laptop anywhere.
I will not switch my NAT with CAT.
I will not switch, and that is THAT!
:)
-prator
It's good to know my ISP is working hard at nights finding new ways to work that extra dollar out of my pocket. The whole reason I pay for that faster than dialup connection is FOR MY OTHER COMPUTERS! My biggest fear is that stupid new laws/protocols/EULA's will be easier to pass now with the Anti-Terrorism bill in effect for the next 4 years. I can just see the cable/DSL companies labling this sort of thing as "hacking" or "Internet Terrorism"
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
next my eletric company will start charging me for each light buld on the chain of lights i leave up for the rest of the year after christmas...
I am already splitting a cable line in my house to 5 different computers. I use a old p120 as a dhcp/firewall to split off to the other 4 main computers. If they do come up with a better protocol than NAT that allows them more "control" over devices behind my cable modem" they are going to come smack into my firewall. This would stop their protocol cold.
So what dose this mean, not much if you put in a fire wall on a old computer worth 50$ which in the long run would cost less then paying for a few extra ip's.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
How does their solution stop you from putting a firewall/router/proxy on the clients end which is the only system to talk directly to the net. Most people don't need to NAT a address to use the web. It seems to me that the people that are likely to set up a wireless network for their friends and neighbors could set up the above devices to mask what's going on.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
I've had DSL and cable for about 4 years now, and I'll be damned if they make me pay for more than one IP. Thanks to Linux and FreeBSD, I can share my connection with several machines. Its not their business what I run behind my router, I still pay for the line, I pay for my bandwidth... If anyone wants to entertain the idea of a startup company that runs fiber to the home and lights it up, count me in, I'll jump on the bandwagon ;)
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
Last I head breech of contract was not illegal, it was just a breech of the contract, IE you won't automatically be arrested for breeching, they have to sue you for damages, or more likey cut you off and try less expensive measures like ruining your cridit.
These are just the sort of problems that the proprietary connections AOL uses don't have. We all see it coming - soon we'll all be using AOL.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
The article mentions something about being able to monitor bandwidth. If this new method is going to be doing a version of NAT itself, then wouldn't the fairest way be just to charge people for bandwidth (or like cell phones, a certain amount per month and then charge for anything in excess of that). I mean, that's where the cost (or at least the problem with people sharing broadband) is...right? An extra node for a device by itself costs nothing, just a few rules in the router's memory. If it was an actual IP address I could see paying the $4.95, those are getting scarce.
Almost. If I split cable service with my neighbor, we can both watch TV at the same time, even different channels: I don't lose anything for doing so, and end up cheating the company. But if I share my bandwith with someone, I have to split the bandwith. That's the difference. Splitting bandwith doesn't double it; splitting CATV service does.
I run a Linux/FreeBSD server on a cheap old box that IP Masquerades. As far as ANY protocol would be concerned its one machine and they WOULD not be able to get past this server machine and therefore have no idea what I am running behind it.
You're missing the underlying point. If I share my cable internet connection with my neighbors, they may be getting service for free, but at the cost of my bandwidth. Every time they view a page, or play a game, I suffer and lose some of my bandwidth. Therefore, I'm paying for them to use my connection. It's not stealing from the cable company, even if you share with your neighbor. I'm paying for bandwidth and I can do whatever I want with it.
...Linksys!!
9 2
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004SB
Almost better than boobies!
The economics behind home broadband assume that you will not use all of the bandwidth you could potentially use. In fact, if everyone on your neighborhood's cable loop were to open their digital faucets full blast all the time, they wouldn't be able to support the load. ISDN or T1 type connections, where you are guaranteed bandwidth, cost proportionally more.
What about if I ask the neighbor to give me $20 a month to share the bandwidth. Is that wrong?
GPL Deconstructed
They mention 802.11b hubs for $100, yeah right not fucking likely, more like $200 - $300. The cable companys are fucking greedy pigs. Where the fuck is IPV6?
The best part about having NAT is having a single bullet-proof firewall.
I'm amazed at the statement that CAT will make "troubleshooting and customer care somewhat easier". When I had cable, I didn't get any customer care.
This article is rather lacking in technical information, but if CAT is going to be similar to a NAT device couldn't you just park a NAT router behind the CAT device? Back to square one. :)
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
again from the article:
"NAT also raises issues for forthcoming cable-delivered home-networking services. A crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear."
They are assuming that any additional devices MUST be behind the NAT gateway. This is simply false. I can run 10 computers behind NAT, and if i bought a "digital cable IP addressable shopping device" to hook up to my TV, i don't have to hook that up to address the internet through the NAT gateway. I could just hook that up directly to the net, so its directly addressable. In short, some devices can be put behind NAT, and some other ones that need to be addressable can be given real IP addresses.
I really don't see how you could achieve this. First the connection (in my area anyway) is promoted as unlimited (ntl in the UK). This applies to the data transfer (up to a reasonable point i suppose). Only the bandwidth (upload/download rates)is restricted. And once you have the connection you can clearly use it for more than one computer - you have that right.
I also don't why they want to talk to all cable devices in the system. I'm unsure of their aim as i only have one which is their cable tv box (which has the modem packaged inside it). This "troubleshooting" point seems fairly suspicious (maybe a power grab) unless the USA has a different cable system from here in the UK.
I can't see why after you have your router they should complain. If you want to share it between different computers in your house you should be allowed to do so. This CAT system seems to be making a mockery of home network security. The involvement of the cable company should stop at the cable modem. They have no right to access your own internal network.
I do agree sharing the system between your neighbours is wrong. But maybe this is an indication of high cost wherever the system is being deployed (like i said, i don't know the costs in the US). Instead of trying to screw around with home networks, they should lower prices instead - make it a bit more affordable. Maybe then people won't share it's bandwidth and they can make a profit.
Sorry, but internet technology is NOT regulated by the FCC.
But the funny thing is: I don't see why this guy's got his undies in a bundle. AT&T was SELLING Linksys NAT boxes in a promotion this summer in my area (Cambridge, MA -- ex-Mediaone). Big flyers! Network your entire house! Share your connection! Granted, they didn't mean with your neighbors, but there you go. I doubt anyone has shelled out the extra money for their vastly overpriced extra IP service.
It is good that there was a warning on the bias of the article. It goes to show that there are too many accountants in the world - there are enough to calculate how much money isn't being spent on their products!
Really, I look at the problem as bandwidth only. I pay so much a month to have a DSL connection. I use a NAT, because it is very convienent. In fact, if my ISP institutes something such as CAT, I will purposely use up as much BW as possible as payback.
To summarize - they'll pry my NAT router from my cold, dead hands.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Stop making sense. You can no longer post anything. Your Slashdot account will be closed momentarily.
Thank you for playing,
The Management
How to Download YouTube Videos
The article calls us NAT users "dishonest" and compares us to people getting free HBO with descramblers. What a crock! We're not taking something we didn't pay for, just using what bandwidth we have creatively.
Just about every broadband provider caps its bandwidth, so if 2 (or more) neighbors want to go halves on the monthly cost, what is the real problem? Where is the dishonesty in that? The article even says:
Tactically, it works like this: Anyone with a networkable computer, an 802.11b antenna and receiver, and approval from the master PC connected to a wireless hub, can sit, invisibly, "behind" the NAT, and share the throughput of the cable modem attached "ahead of" the NAT.
Notice the words share the throughput. Remember when Lars Ulrich was on MTV saying that Napster wasn't sharing in the sense that if you share a sandwich with someone you are left with only 1/2 a sandwich. (Thus you are not as inclined to share when it means less for you). That is what is going on in this scenario, and I see nothing wrong with it.
Hey guess what? I have a friend who just moved, and another friend's mother who just moved. They rented a Uhaul truck for a day, and split the cost. Once I shared a plate of french fries with someone at the local diner. Yeah it was half the cost, but each person got 1/2 the fries/uhaul/bandwidth too.
Is based upon having lots of customers with under-used accounts. Its called over-subscription. They sell more bandwidth than they actually have- and if most users are only using 50% of what they are paying for, then the ISP can charge less to its customers (being competitive) and have more customers than they can really support.
The thing they want to do is prevent people from sharing or reselling portions of their bandwidth with their neighbors, because then every customer will be alot closer to 100% utilization.
To simplify: What they want is to have 2 paying customers at 50% utilization rather than 1 paying customer at 100% utilization.
There are already NAT boxes out there. I don't know what thair CAT thing will do, but essenailly my comptuer connects to it, and... oh, guess what, I have the old NAT program installed, and my old program claims just one computers.
sharing 802.11b with neighbors who don't pay for their own service is immoral, but the proper way to charge is by bandwidth. Sharing wireless hubs is nice though, joggers can (in theory, I don't think anyone has done it) connect to various neighbor's wireless hubs as they walk down the street for continious music from the net. When in the backyard you can connect to the net from your laptop and compare those directions on pruning with what your trees look like, and who cares if it is your hub or the neighbor's?
The article seems to be written from the point of view that anything that the cable companies could charge you should be charged for.
The truth of that matter is that you're paying for bandwidth, not the number of PCs connected. Bandwidth is easily controlled by existing head-end routing hardware. The incremental costs in providing service are running the connection to a house and then providing the bandwidth. Extra PCs all sharing the same amount of bandwidth have zero additional cost. Does the author understand the difference between packet switching and circuit switching?
I think the comparison with early cable "theft" is spurious. What exactly is being stolen when using a gateway router? Nothing.
Besides, saying stuff like:
doesn't exactly give you a lot of credibility. Packet versus circuit switching is probably a bit beyond this person.
Ellis299@aol.com
^----------enough said
My cable modem (at&T broadband) sucks anyway.. it's increasingly slow and unreliable. A year ago, games rocked. I pinged 20-60 in Q2 and half-life. Now latency is high, I'm lucky to find a server where I ping 100.
Played with Verizon DSL when I was at my parents' this weekend, and it's much better than cable, at least right now. This kind of crap is all I need to justify the hassle of switching.
For some reason in the past decade or so, there has been a real movement to convince the consumer that if something can make money it should. This basically throws fair use out the window and requires the consumer to keep spending more and more for less and less. It frightens me to think what the end result of this path would be.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
At the risk of being gauche and following up to my own post:
_ st artup.asp
http://www.computers4sure.com/linksys/store/att
This is a link to a page I got to via http://www.broadband.att.com. Sign up with AT&T broadband, and they'll dropship you the Linksys NAT of your choice (wired or wireless). Tah dah!
when you setup your wireless network to share with your neighbours, just pass on the the $4.95/month charge for the IP.
-kidlinux.
The water company, gas company, electic company all do it: they charge me according to what I use. Why can the cable ISPs do the same thing?
If my mom does a few e-mails and a little surfing per day, why should she have to pay the same as me, who's downloading hundreds of megs of porn, er <cough> I mean distros?
Sure, there's some baseline charge to pay for the infrastructure, but above and beyond that: charge us according to what we use!
Since they charge a flat fee, it seems pretty obvious that they price it based on their infrastructure costs - the price of maintaining the line to my house, the modem at their end, the gateways, DNS, etc. If they can't tell that I have other people connected, doesn't that imply that they cannot quantify how much more it is costing them? If I throw up an 802.11b network, then I'm footing the bill for all the infrastructure. From their perspective, their costs go up exactly zero, with a flat-rate pricing structure.
To me - this just sounds like one thing: GREED.
Get busy living or get busy dying. Carpe diem.
...like I'm going to share my bandwidth with my neighbors... Riiiiight.
I don't want that punk ass kid up the road hacking CCs and pulling down warez on MY pipe (Nor do I want those guys w/the black sunglasses knocking on my door claiming I pulled down 100 gigs of kiddie pr0n because one old pervert learned he had free bandwidth...)
And I LIKE having a seperate network behind my NAT box, it gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling knowing it's MUCH harder to get in.
Thank God I have DSL!
Do nothing unless you must, and when you must act -- hesitate.
"With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won't be able to see into all connected devices-making remote troubleshooting difficult-because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices. It's the data communications equivalent of, "You wanna talk to her, you go through me"-except you don't even know she's there to talk."
Which cable company is THIS? I know many people who would love their cable company to troubleshoot ALL of their net connected devices, for the simple fee of $5.00/month/IP address. 10 computers? 50 extra bucks a month to make sure the cable company can address and troubleshoot them. What nice guys!
Really now... often those cable tech support guys don't seem know all that much. As if they'll know enough (and actually be willing) to remotely troubleshoot your computer.
CAT is their new cable router that lets them snoop on you...the article envisions when a cable customer gets internet cable access not only do you get a cable modem, but a (CAT) cable router, which the cable company has hooks into.
...how can they tell if I have 12 kids, each with their own 802.11b lappy; *or* 11 of my neighbors are piggy-backing of my wireless? [along with my legal lappy].
My question is
In fact, they could be piggybacking without my knowledge !!! HEY...[scurries home to check]
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
As a consumer with a long term view, I'd much prefer a commodity market for packet delivery - just as I would for any other essential utility such as phone or electric.
I'd be willing to pay based on Quality of Service parameters, time of day, mean bandwidth, maximum latency, etc., but definitely don't want the service provider reaching into the guts of my home network as part and parcel of the service. Naturally, services based on open standards are subject to greater rigor in the competitive marketplace than closed "standards".
While I realize that no stone goes unturned in the marketing departments seeking to
- "provide solutions" ,
- "add value" ,
- "open new revenue streams",
it would be as if my electric company were billing me for every circuit in my house instead of just the 200 A service to the meter! As another example, it would be as if your trucking company started to provide warehousing and inventory control of your goods.It's fine to provide and charge services for a separate business of Home LAN Construction and Management (assuming you trust your vendor), but artificially mixing packet transport providers with this other service seems to me to be just another attempt to provide a gratuitous lock-in in the guise of and end-to-end "solution".
Alas, people will probably fall (again) for a well-marketed scheme to reduce apparent complexity, even as they remain unaware of the long-term consequences of their choices.
The costs of simplification are greater than many realize.
"Pardon, NAT, what's that behind you?"
Hmm, sounds like someone is writing "tech" articles without really knowing anything about IP. NAT isn't all that easy to detect now, and it certainly wouldn't be hard to change any free IP stack to hide anything in packet headers that might give it away.
There is nothing here to stop me plugging oh say a Linux PC into whatever fancy device they want, and having a second NIC running to my plain old hub and doing IP Masquerade for my whole LAN. The only way they can enforce this is if they require you to use binary-only drivers for some specific OS which is then broken to defeat such routing over the proprietary interface.
At which point, I wouldn't want to pay anything for the service anyway.
It seems to me like their proposed solution just replaces the nat hub with a cat hub that can enumerate all of the devices it is providing internal ip addresses for.
An easy way to get around this would be just to connect a NAT hub to The CAT hub and have all your devices go through that. Or even if they do specifically detect if there is a NAT hub in line you can still hook up a cheap linux box and use it as a router. Then the linux box will be the only device enumerated on your subnet, and you can still keep giving out the free bandwidth. (power to you)
Regards
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
Dunno about elsewhere, but around here (NB, Canada), WAAAYYY back, the phone company tried to charge per connection into the house, because people were splicing off lines add adding their own phones (how insane!!!). Back in the day, the court ruled that they were merely providing the service, and once it was in your house you could do what you wanted with it. AFAIK I heard this story from someone I know), when the local cable company took someone to court over a simmilar situation, this was used as a precedant, ands their case was dismissed. Now you can run as many cable connections as you want off your line, provided you splice them yourself, and the cable company can't do anything about it. I seriously suspect this exact same precident could be applied in this case. All they ar eproviding is the connection, once it's inside your house, you can do what you want with it.
My new hobby is to connect a single computer to my cable connection and have it randomly surf the internet, transferring every picture and download it can to /dev/null.
I can see the Cable Co's not wanting people to set up wireless networks for the entire neighborhood. Doing so cuts into their bottom line.
However, making people pay for multiple ip adresses is ridiculous. Why should people be punished for having more than one PC or networked appliance in their home. I just want to use the internet in any room, not start my own neighborhood ISP!
you mean these idiots haven't heard of bandwidth limiting? there is no way they're going to tell me how to run my own network.
That's the link to the NAT-alternative. It doesn't really seem that ominous. Nothing spelled out there that directly threatens NAT. Perhaps just some additional advantages that might make CAT better to NAT for the typical consumer.
- standards in home networking components, so your fridge can talk to your NAT device
- lower cost through standardized components
- standard allows for remote access by cable operators, to help with support
- quality of service within the home (??)
- security (??)
I'm sure many linux users will stick with NAT.Community wireless networks have the ability to fight back by not using service that's licensed for one home. Depending on the size of the community network, splitting the cost of a T1 or faster line will be worth the payoff because of the increased outgoing line speed. Most DSL and Cable caps off at 128kbits outgoing, which makes for very frustrated webmasters and people like me who create high bandwidth content (video) and need to upload frequently to co-location facilities.
Also, commercial lines are usually much more reliable than DSL modem pools, especially if said DSL service is using PPPoe. (yech)
By sharing your home DSL connection overtly, you are setting a bad example and giving the DSL and cable providers a legal excuse to pick a fight.
If you're going to give a few neighbors access to your DSL/Cable line, don't advertise it and don't pick people who are going to be high bandwidth consumers. The best people to share it with are people who would otherwise not be interested in paying for internet access, but would stand to benefit from having access to information if so taught. (the elderly and disabled)
The best example of a solid, fast community network is featured in the previous /. article about a community fiber network in Sweden.
Of course, the broadband infrastructure over there seems to be in much better shape than the borderline monopolies we have here. -affordable- commercial high speed access in most American states still seems to be elusive. The power is in the numbers.
--Mike
Here's my idea:
Cable companies give everyone a 10.0.0.x or similar address. This way, you can't run apache etc etc because you'd have to get the cable company to port forward or what not.
You'd still be able to do 99% of the things you do, because most people are NAT'd on their internal network as it is.
This would solve most of their problems.
My old ISP used to do that.....I'd dial in, the Lucent Ascend would give me a 10.0.0.x and it's all gravy.
Question is...can you NAT again? Have a second level of this? I've never tried it so I don't know. I'm guessing this probably won't work and thats why they don't already do it.
But if it did work, it seems to be a very simple solution.
Let's see, there are hundreds of millions of computer users in the world right? Now, many of those computers (let's say 50%) are setup without any wire-control systems, but the OTHER 50% are probably using "twist ties" instead of my whiz-bang WireTyer device (order now for only $100, a $300 value, operators are standing by)! Since that would make for about 300 million people who are not using my WireTyer device, at $100 a pop. That's $30 billion dollars that I have lost! Woe is me!
comcast @home wanted an extra $6 or so per additional computer. I did not have any objections to this at all. I had no start up costs, was leasing the cable modem so when I had a problem it was their business. Then I moved 30 miles away and could not get @home anymore. I had to go through optimumonline. Optimumonline required me to buy the modem ~$300, and they wanted me to pay $20 per additional computer. This is unreasonable. Even though I already had a router and could bypass them easily I opted for DSL.
Note: the article is written from an interesting point of view -- it's aimed at the people who want to collect the additional per-IP charges
Before I read, I figured, yes, there's reasonable ways that they could phrase this to indicate their real-world need to create new services, and provide additional revenues. They could even make a case for improved security, as few of their customers know how to secure their own networks.
Instead, it's phrased in the all-too-familiar language of corporate greed, "our customer's are robbing us! How do we stop it and make the money that they are bleeding us for?!?!!"
A slight difference of spin could help them deploy this, and could even make CAT work to the benefit of consumers. But with people like this leading the groupthink, I despair.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
The article seems to show an understanding that they can't do anything about NAT, they'd be hard pressed to remove it from homes. But they can offer IT service contracts to deal with "certified" devices connected to their cable modem, enumerated behind a "CAT" box.
Bad as it sounds, this may be nice for folks who want conected devices in their home but aren't IP-savvy. The cable company would have to be able to see into this network to maintain it, and people would pay more to get (cable-company-quality) service.
I don't see this as being a very big market, in the same way that not many people now have phone line service contracts in their homes.
Yea, the cable companies would like to charge per-device fees to all customers, but I don't see how they could.
Most houses in North America/Europe/Oceania have multiple telephones in the house. I know my house has around 5 telephone devices (including modems, phones, answering machines...) connected through our single phone number. But yet, we share the same phone number and the same bill. It does not matter which telephone makes the call, all calls are under the same number, and we are billed per minute of long-distance time used.
How is this any different? I don't need to get the phone company's permission to install an additional telephone. And the data sent across a phone network (especially if it is a modem) is exactly the same kind of traffic as goees down a DSL pipe.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
Notice at the bottom of the article, the author's email address "Ellis299@aol.com". Well, that explains the mentality at work here.
I think the brunt of this article is talking about "stealing IP addresses". i don't know about you all, but my ISP (ATT@home) gives me one single IP address. It is issued via DHCP, and is dependant on the MAC address of my router. If I don't give them my MAC address or I cange it, poof! I just lost my access. AFAIK this is common proctice in the industry.
While I have 9 machines, router included currently running behind my calbe modem, I would like this "Leslie Ellis" schmo to come and tell me how exactly I'm stealing IP addresses. Last time I checked, the 192.168 network, was private and non-routeable. Considering that the IP's I'm using are non-routeable, how is it that the ISP can "own" them and therefore claim I'm "stealing" them and also charge me extra to use them?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I've had the @Home techs admit over the phone that their DNS was down, and in the next breath blame my problems on me because I'm running a Linux firewall. Every time I call them I must disconnect the home network and connect a Windows PC (no Macs or Unix or anything not from billg) directly to the cable modem. I can't even go through my hub, even though I pay for two IP addresses (how they expect me to use two addresses on one cable modem without a hub is anybody's guess).
Customer Care? WTF is that?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
You mean GIFS as in "GIFTS"?
Yes, this is the proper pronunciation. I happen to know Mr. Gif himself and he told me so.
If your service contract does NOT allow home networking your internet access then they have a bone to pick here. If the service agreement does allow it (and mine DOES, they just refuse to support more than one PC, after that I'm on my own) then implementing this would be breach of contract.
they charge $5.00 a month per IP. It took a while but the way they do it is by mac address verification. They know your modem mac and if the see anything elso online they halt service and require a remote reset. I was able to get my modem's mac address and using my Linksys router, assign IT the same mac :) Now I've got dhcp running and they are none the wiser. My sdsl connection is superior in ping time and reliability but it is hard to beat 2.5 mb download of of astound cable. PL sucks so I game on the SDSL and pir8 my muzak from the cable :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
even with NAT, the MAC address of the original computer is in the packet
Say what? Where is there room in an IP v4 packet for any MAC address, much less the MAC addresses of both the public interface of the NAT router (bridge) and the private interface of a host behind the NAT router? Please clarify.
behind them. Remember that you are paying for peak performance with broadband. That translates to only one thing for the cable companies:
oversell
So any additional use is costing them, and they can figure out how much. Imagine the MBA's a few years ago when they formulated the business plan, say for domestic cable rates: Most people work all day, they have only one computer. No pda's, etc.
Now everything is connected, and we can use our bandwidth when we're away from our dens. People running servers. Un*x desktops in the home with uptimes in years. It must be sheer hell for them, and they can probably estimate the "cost" of an additional IP.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
The article says that 8 years ago, "The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then." Couldn't be further from the truth. In 1993 14.4kbps was almost obsolete, 28.8 was just coming out. The web was being invented, and plenty of people at universities and companies used e-mail, MUDs, IRC, gopher, and FTP.
"no one had fully imagined that regular, everyday consumers would someday own multiple PCs, and would want a way to hook them together." Funny, it was almost exactly 8 years ago that id software released Doom, a game with built in network play.
"NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery." NAT isn't bad, stealing internet is bad. Typical corporate response - MP3 turns out to be bad, because people use it to pirate music. Guns turn out to be bad, because people use them to shoot people.
I am buying the bandwidth. If I want to let my neighbor have some I am intitled to do that. and please, tell me what neighbor would even think about this?...I think they are just freeking out over an Idea in an article I read last yeas called Packet space where people could sell you their bandwidth while you walked down the street.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
On my @Home network, my upload speed is capped at 128Kb. I'm lucky if I see 75% of that on a regular basis. I'm surely not going to share that bandwidth with a neighbor for free. Even if I charge them, I still get the short end of it when they have Morpheus or Bear Share running 24/7.
Ok so lets say they give me some kind of CAT router that allows them to see the machines behind my Linux based firewall. They are going to see exactly one more box -- another firewall that will route the rest of the traffic onto my network. It's a sort of CAT to NAT bridge. To the CAT router it will look like one device. To my network it will look like a gateway. Has it been written yet... well, ok no, but it'll take about a day after the introduction of the CAT device for it the routing software to hit the streets.
PS isn't penetrating my firewall illegal?
mcsey
From the article: Specifically, [NAT] was intended to simplify small business networks, so that the technologically-challenged small business owner could install and run IP address-sharing on a run-of-the-mill local area network...
... interesting how they take a buisness application of a technology and interpret it not just as the justification - but as the intention of that technology's invention. what a spin!
hmm
glad my Linksys lets me remap the mac addresses. now, what messages should I hide in the macs for them to see?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
If your ISP ends up imposing CAT on you, and you don't agree with it, then switch providers. I switched from cable to ADSL to get a much less draconian AUP.
That's right a "Technology Analyst" with an AOL address. Fuck, I wonder how much this person gets paid, an easy job, easy money, and you don't have to know shit about what you're talking about.
Someone needs to smack this person with a cluestick. Has this person heard of cable companies that encourage you to use NAT? What does this person think that a gateway running NAT would look like to this fancy new computer counting technology? Has this person actually neworked two computers together, or did (s)he just read "Wired's history of the Internet and NAT, for dummies?"
Thanks..
Put in simple, small words, if you don't pay for it, you don't get to use it. If you pay for it, you don't get to resell it. Read the AUP.
They don't care if you set up a home LAN - unless you DHCP every node at which point they'll charge you for the additional IP addresses. They do care if you use 802.11 to grant free access to every neighbor within a 100m radius.
(Emphasis mine)
When I see a statement like that coming from the self-described "Premier Magazine of Broadband Technology", I have to wonder whether the writer or editor munch on lead paint chips during breaks.
Oh, wait: it's a Cahners publication.
Nevermind.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
AC comments get piped to
What I found most interesting about this article was the amount of time it spent name calling-- in particular, the IPS's users 'thieves'.
Of course any movement has its particular socialization. The OSS movement in particular hangs on the 'Information Wants to Be Free' slogan.
It's a little more extreme in this case. The author of the article, and probably the magazine that published it, has a definite agenda to push. The agenda here is to try to limit the amount of bandwidth any one user uses per month. In this case, they're pushing their new 'standard' (*snicker*), and are trying to convince the readers of the article that it's not only right to force that on their users, but that the users need have done something wrong and criminal that they need to be punished for.
Personally, when I pay for cablemodem service, I figure that if I pay $50/month for 384kbyte/s service, then I'm paying $50 for
384kbyte * 2678400 and whatever I don't use is just a bonus for the cable co.
It's obvious that Cable providers would have a different viewpoint, but to criminalize their oppozing viewpoints is altogether more than is called for.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I am by no means an IPV6 expert, but I remember it has a larger address space. Wasn't one of the drivers for this so that your toaster can have an IP, along with your Xbox, PC, etc etc. Oh, and that is what is going to make this a real issue real soon, while only true geeks will have more than one real PC for now, MANY people will soon have a PC and a game system that they want to connect to the net... As far as how to charge, well bandwidth and IP address are both limited resources, so both will get charged for. And since it seems broadband providers in the US are loosing money, prices very may well go up for people who use more of their resources.
-Paul
Routers,firewalls, NAT gateways, etc. rip the MAC address off and replace it with their own and do NOT forward the source MAC address in the packet. Only hubs, bridges, and switches leave the original MAC in place and none of these devices have the ability to do NAT. Run some tcpdumps on the dirty side of your firewall sometime if you don't believe me. If your former employer funded this project it's easy to see why they went under.
$5/GB would be a sweet deal.
My provider (hurray for monopolies!) gives me 5GB downstream and 1GB upstream per month for the flat rate.
Any traffic exceeding those limitations is billed.
AT 7 CENTS PER MEGABYTE!
Yes, I did type that correctly.
$71.68 per GB.
I'm glad they didn't even bother trying to charge me during Sircam/CodeRed. My traffic light (incoming) was going crazy, and I wasn't about to pay them for traffic I didn't ask for.
On that note, if I get pingflooded some night, without noticing -- say I get 100kB/sec for 3 hours; and it's over my limit, that costs me ~$100.
I particularly like how they said the CAT would help them service customers better. Help them trouble shoot if they know what is connected. I have dealt with tech support for my cable provider and I think that if you actually know less than them, then most likely you are already paying for your extra IP's. Most trouble shooting has to do with replacing/fixing their own hardware or you knowing your own computer and how to set up your network. If they want to help with trouble shooting I would try employee education. CAT would only confuse them further.
I can still set up a NAT box of my own behind their "authorized NAT (or CAT or whatever)". I can feed disinformation to their hardware. I don't see how this prevents me from doing what they are trying to prevent me from doing. I can make a box look like one box to them.
The problem is that the cost structure of ISP services doesn't match the pricing structure. Charging per bit moved wouldn't work, because for most residential service the main cost is infrastructure support (the cost of maintaining the pipe, regardless of whether it's used). But charging only for access, as is currently done, doesn't reflect the scarcity of the actual resource -- bits moved.
The only reason we (residential customers) have to sign no-resale agreements is that the ISP's pricing structure is a poor match to the cost structure. Think about it: if the match were better in the high-demand case, then no agreement would be necessary. Does the power company forbid you from reselling your power? No -- but it doesn't make economic sense for you, because the price structure matches the cost OK in the high demand case.
The no-redistribution agreeent is a kludge that doesn't even work to limit customer bandwidth in all cases. Typical ISPs might oversell their pipes by a factor of 50, so each user must stay below 1/50 of their long-term-average bandwidth or else the ISP loses money. I just upgraded my DSL connection to 640kb symmetric, and one use I'm putting the pigger pipe to is listening (at work) to my home mp3 jukebox. That uses 128kbps, or just over 1/5 of my pipe -- so my ISP, who charges only for access, loses out on the deal if I leave the stereo running all day.
A low-volume NATted subnet doesn't affect the fan-out rate nearly as much as a heavy data mover like my mp3 stream -- though it does use slightly more bandwidth. A high-volume NATted subnet increases the spikiness of the load on the ISPs pipe and requires beefier infrastructure -- so you should pay for it.
It seems to me that the ISPs that charge nothing up to some volume of data flow, then a fee per gigabyte above that, have the right idea. That charging scheme matches well with the actual cost of high-volume users. (Cell-phones work that way too...)
Hey, I'd like to know where I can get one of those frames with the GIFs. ;-)
Am I the only one who has noticed:
@home arrives, up/down is whatever you get.
(best was ~420k/s down/ 250k/s kbytes, not bits)
About a year later...down did not change much, upload capped at 128kbytes.
A year after that when *other* @home areas got 256kbyte caps...chithead^H^H^H^H^ charter capped at 128kbits ~12kbytes/s.
Pardon my french, but these fucking morons did it to themselves by completeley defeating the purpose of broad band.
IN ADDITION: The divx fiasco where not only did they kill off the groups, but @home posters got jack booted thu^H^H^H^H^H^H cease and desist letters from the MPAA w/o so much as a "how do you do".
Yet again, they defeat the purpose of broad band.
They have yet to provide:
1)content anyone really wants
2)bandwidth people need (down and UP for christ-sake...30 minutes or more for a 900K attachment? PHEH...you are out of your fricking mind if you think that is adequate)
3)any reason whatsoever for me to recommend broadband to anyone who even *considers cable*...I say the magic words xDSL...if you can get it...fsck cable, they offer *no incentives* to get or stay with them.
4)Intelligent network management. Scanning users machines for NNTP services... with a 12kbyte upload speed?...WTF ARE THEY SMOKING!!!!
I'm giving charter pipeline a month or so for some sort of intelligent management to show its face...while looking elsewhere for broadband.
I feel sorry for the fact I've recommended cable to literally several dozen people!
And to be treated like this?
I'm fixing that mistake as quickly as possible...in addition to their mistakes, I'm just fueling the fire.
(fingers crossed, eyes closed, mumbeling "competant service, competant service, pleeeeaaassseee!)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
...always post as cowards? They may be money grubbing, but their ethnicity has little to do with it. I think there's still plenty that you need to "get".
Fact: those who are bootlegging will never be found, unless a physical inspection is made.
This CAT protocol sounds like it will involve some sort of authentication against a directory, such as Microsoft Active Directory [Passport], or Novell Directory Services. If they know what they're doing, then only authenticated packets will be allowed on the network. The cracker/hacker community will then have to figure out a way to break Microsoft [Kerberos] or Novell [RSA] authentication and write a CAT router [bridge] for Linux/*BSD with the broken authentication scheme. Presumably, legitimate CAT vendors, like Cisco/Nortel/Lucent/Linksys/Microsoft/Novell will release proprietary solutions that refuse to forward packets from a host behind the firewall if that host can't be authenticated to the directory.
The only hope is that packet-by-packet authentication will require so much in the way of hardware resources that the broadband ISPs won't want to take the plunge [i.e. VERY expensive authentication/encryption hardware modules on Cisco routers coupled with an upgrade of all the end user cable modems].
It's kind of like renting an apartment with a clause in the lease that you cannot sublet rooms to others, essentially 'reselling' the space. Sometimes they don't even like other people they don't know about moving in, like you sign up just for yourself and later on invite your brother to stay for free.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Expect analogous manuvering whereever centralized controls exist. Monopolies inherently ignore the desires of the "customers", because the "customer" doesn't have much recourse.
If you don't like that model, you can model it using a balance of powers kind of arrangement. It gives a slightly more accurate answer, but takes a lot more work to get it.
Or you can just say: "If I look at how MS acts, and how IBM acted, and how Standard Oil acted, then I get a reasonable estimate of how some different company in an anologous situation will act."
Yes, it all devolves back to individual choices made by individual human beings. But in a large enough organization, these will tend toward an average that is partially cultural, and largely genetic. (This is the way people [apes [primates [mammals [...]]]] act in a situation like this.... Don't expect otherwise.)
To avoid the results, redesign the sytems. More particularly, consider these consequences when you are designing systems that aren't yet in a dominant position. All systems started out in non dominant positions. If you avoid centrallized choke points (single points of failure), then you will avoid one class of errors.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sure, if the sharing isn't happening behind a firewall. But as far as I know most residential router thingy's create a private lan that sits behind a firewall. Obviously they're not concerned about ip's completely, but bandwidth, but what's the difference between me having my 3 linux boxen and one Mac OS X box having access and some luser's Windows box with AOL and nimda hitting every web server on this side of the planet? If cable companies want to conserve their bandwidth, they should stop supporting virus laden operating systems (long shot). Now that I think about it, all they really want is more money, and they're following the flawed thinking that every pirate (not that I like that term) would be a subscriber if they couldn't get the service for free. It just isn't true.
Why can't we have non-profit member owned isps, like public radio? Then wireless networking would be encouraged, and we could probably get access for less. We could even have municipal access points to which anyone could connect.
I guess that's the pendulum swinging the other way.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
At least, it is 2 problems from the cable ISP viewpoint.
First, they plan networks with a certain usage in mind. This much bandwidth supports this many subscribers, physical infrastructure costs this much, therefore a subscriber has to be charged that much money. When you use more bandwidth than the plan says, you're messing up their model, and they basically lose money on your business. Doesn't really matter if you are using more bandwidth because you download/upload huge amounts of stuff, or if you share your connection with your neighbors, and therefore use three "normal" subscribers worth of bandwidth. The cable ISP is still losing money on your business.
The second problem is that ISPs are still trying to figure out how to do 3 tiers of service, instead of just 2. Right now, you get residential and business. What would probably be preferred is "basic" residential, "power user" residential, and business.
Of course, the problem is one that has been mentioned here several times before... People want to pay for a connection, not for bandwidth, or, more importantly, for bandwidth usage. And the cable ISPs like advertising connection speeds, and don't want to admit that you aren't actually supposed to *use* all that speed. Like a Van Gogh in a museum, it's there to be looked at, not to be touched or used.
The point of charging for each connected device is really just another way of trying to charge for expected bandwidth usage. Per device is only the issue until they can figure out how to convince people to accept subscriptions for a set usage per month. (Which I won't be happy with, as I tend to move a lot of data, but I can understand. Commercial USENET servers do this already, $X per month for Y gig per month.)
Look for it coming soon in your Acceptable Use Policy. They'll determine what the "average" subscriber uses in bandwidth, and set the acceptable rate at 1-sigma above that. And you'll pay for more than that usage.
Hmm... that'll make online gaming *really* expensive.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
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Except there aren't any additional IP addresses being used. And of course, as with most speculative damages, this fails to take into consideration the fact that many of these additional computers would not be networked for internet access at $5 per month if there were no "free" alternative available. Consumers gaining functionality does not automatically equate to companies losing profits, especially if the service offered is not the one desired (IP addresses vs. just a data pipe).
With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won't be able to see into all connected devices-making remote troubleshooting difficult-because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices.
Oh no, my cable company won't be able to mess around with the equipment without my knowledge. I'm so worried.
CAT could replace NAT altogether, at least in equipment hand-picked by MSOs for home-network service packages. ... At the very least, cable MSOs involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices.
Um, why should my cable company be able to penalize me for having devices that aren't routinely (or ever) used for internet access? So I guess I'll need NAT in the CAT... This whole article is one big piece of misinformation and FUD. My cable company doesn't need to know what I have on my private network - they provide the pipe, I use it. They might be able to monitor some of the data that goes through their network, but anything more invades my privacy (ethical argument, not legal argument) and puts my network at risk of attack. NAT will be around until the cable companies buy a law banning it, and then it will still be around illegally.
What if a PC is hooked up to the cable modem. Then a router is hooked, via a second network card, into the PC?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Umm, check your contract. You are actually paying for the _connection_ to a particular residence, not the bandwidth.
What I was asking is how the heck their cable router can see past my NAT box...
Seeing as how the author is complaining about the people savvy enough to set this up already, surely he can't believe that people won't just go ahead and continue to do what they're already doing.
funny how in this day and age being "nickel and dimed" == $4.95 ....
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
I used to have @Home in my apartment, I HATED the politics. Now in my house, I have a cable modem with a smaller cable company called Cable America.
Thier user agreement makes no limitation on servers, number of nodes or the like. The only limitation I recall is that I can not "resell the bandwidth" or "use it for commercial purposes". Now... I suppose I could give away access/bandwidth, and just charge for air-time on an 802.11 network to my LAN or server.
I've no compulsion to do this as I enjoy the roughly 300KB/s downloads and 50K/s uploads of me connection. Sharing for me is not an option.
My provider does charge $10/month for static routable IPs though. Still, I run 6 nodes behind a Gnu/Linux box that they never see. The server runs sendmail, ftp and apache for 9 domain names, plus several minor web sites for friends.
I've had this whole charge per node / charge per connection argument with other providers though, such as Sprint Broadband. They wanted to charge my customers (computer consultant don't ya know) per box, instead of per connection. They seem to think that it should cost more to have 20 nodes doing light browsing, than 1 node saturating a T1 23 hours a day.
If I purchase a connection I should get a connection. If I purchase an IP address I should get an IP address. What I do after that should not be the provider's business.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
"NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery. Its intentions were good; but one portion of its reality is clearly not so good."
Conclusion:
ONLY marketable, profitable ideas can be GOOD.
Except that their solution, like CSS or any other "anti-piracy" solution, is not going to punish merely the offenders. It is also quite likely to catch a lot of innocent people in its claws. The article itself seems to have a very negative view on NAT, which indicates to me that they think plain-old-honest-sensible address translation is a criminal behavior if it deprives them of revenue. Serious questions need to be asked and answered before we who are technologically savvy allow this sort of thing to become widespread (if we even have a say in the matter).
Most importantly, does this portend a future in which NAT or ip chains are deemed a violation of our user agreements? If so, I would have never signed up (well, maybe I would have, but given the criminal penalties provisioned in the DMCA and that NAT could be deemed a circumvention device if the cable company only approves this proposed CAT nonsense...). So the real question is, would you like to occupy the cell next to Dmitry simply for having a firewall and a class C network?
I do not have a signature
Hell, I never even thought of it. They can't even detect that I'm sharing the connection? I'll get with the neighbors now! Thanks, CED Magazine!
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
It's not very hard to set up a proxy that sits between your household network and the cable modem. I'm not sure exactly how cable companys can get around that. Given that, how soon are we going to see turn key proxying solutions? Or are they here already? I haven't paid too much attention to home networking since I ditched my cable service a while ago. Before then I was using a surplus 486 as a router proxy.
This really is pretty sad indeed. Honestly, it pisses me off that there are some people out there breaking the service agreements which they signed/accepted when they began paying for their service. I live in an apartment with 3 roommates, and the four of us all share one cable modem, all connected through an OpenBSD box running ipfilter. It's a gray area, but the cable installer didn't seem to care what we were running on the machine when he came to hook things up.
It's just ridiculous what cable companies are considering.. the current cable system works pretty well:
The typical setup of the average DOCSIS device is a layer 2 bridge... and the metric your local cable company uses to sell you an additional 'IP' is for each 4.95 you pay, your cable modem gets put in a different class which causes it to download a configuration file at bootup which allows a larger number of MAC addresses to live on the customer side of the bridge.
I'm glad I'll always be able to have an OpenBSD box running PAT (hopefully), but a bunch of my friends in the area who've got little router-boxen would be paying much more than they'd have to if they didn't have that solution readily available.
Seriously, though, this could always end up being one of those things where they buttrig the internet connection so much that you've got to run all sorts of proprietary software on your computer just to authorize your machine to connect to the internet. What happens to those of us who want to run non-MS OSes then?
What the fuck Over...
Can you really do this????
Wow, thanks CED Magazine for the great idea.
I'm gonna share my cable modem with my 3 neighbors that will come to only $10 per month!!!!
maybe an electric analogy is better.
I pay per KWh (kilo Watt hour). No one cares if I am running 1 fridge or 5, 10 lights or 72 or none. I pay per kilowatt hour. I can use several devices at the same time. I can also let my neighbour plug his light bulbs into my grid, but his power consumption is additive on my bill.
pay per kWh. why not pay per GB? (as long as it isn't on the saem pay scale as those nasty text messaging phone prices per text message).
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
Of course, this would probably only affect Joe Average; somehow, I can't see CAT support being put into OpenBSD or Linux.
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
The article isn't targeting people who do NAT in their own homes, among their own machines. It targets, rather legitimately, people who use services without paying for them. Right now, there's simply no way to tell if people are using NAT for illegitimate purposes (or even using it at all, for that matter.) The article merely brings this fact to light.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
First my view:
I used to work in the cable modem industry, and my beliefs made it very hard to me to tell people that they needed to cough up an extra $4.95 per computer they wanted online.
I always looked at it like every other cable or electricity or phone service. You pay a certain amount of money for a line that goes up to your house, and the ability to use the service provided in general.
Think about it. I can have 1 phone, or 10,000 phones all connected to the same phone line. The phone company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the number of calls I make. I can have 1 outlet, or 10,000 outlets. (Or one desk lamp, or 10,000 desk lamps.) The elctric company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the amount of electricity used.
The cable company will let me connect 1 or 10,000 televisions up to their CATV service, so long as I pay my monthly bill for the channels I recieve.
Similarly, I should be able to have 1 computer, or 10,000 computers, so long as I pay for the bandwidth and IPs I use. In my case, I use 1 IP amongst 4 computers, and have opted to pay for the fastest cable modem service available, making it easy for all 4 computers to be using the service without noticable speed problems.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with my setup.
Now for the problem:
IPv4 has a limit number of valid IP's available. Many of the class A ranges are already taken by telco's and large network companies. If everyone obeyed the cable company's silly policies about 1 IP per computer, they WOULD run out of IP space. Yes, it would be a while, but if everyone that could have cable television had cable internet, and they all had an average of 1.5 PC's in their homes, you're looking at more than likely more IPs than are currently available.
The argument that poeple who use NAT to connect multiple devices to the Internet over a cable modem are stealing service is completely wrong.
The truth is that there is only a single connection to the Internet through the cable modem. The NAT device is the only device connected to the Internet and is thus the only billable connection. All other devices simple connect to the NAT device, not the Internet.
Since the devices connected through NAT are not actually connected to the Internet, they have limits on their functionality. These limits include not handling incoming connections. For some users, this makes the rental of another IP address worth-while. For most of us, it doesn't.
Wouldn't ISP better spend their scarce resources converting their networks to IPv6 instead of pushing NAT research? Am I uninformed that NAT research is more cost effective than converting to IPv6?
Seems to me this would allow full control over the IP addresses issued to a customer. Bonus! You would have real IP addresses for each node and could easily block your picture frame from accessing the WAN.
Whoa! Perhaps this is the work of the IP address cartel. (There is no address cartel.) If they switch to Ipv6, then the address shortage would go away and they wouldn't be able to charge for additional addresses! No wonder we haven't switched over yet.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
It is common for a big corp to punish a small amount a abusers by passing the cust on to the whole group of users. It is the easyist and fastest solution they can come up with.
Also I dont feel that running NAT is a crime. YOu get 1 what you do with that is up to you. I doubt there are people sharing the cable with their whole apartment building because keep all that strat (ie NAT tables IP filtter andthe such) would be a handful. Plus the people who can do write nat tables most times aret the same people that use a lot of bandwidth for what ever.
The only possible crime would beto charge people to use your NAT srever which would be basicly sebleting your cable which is terribly illegal
Remember the days when some cable companies would charge extra for having an extra jack in apartments where they knew how many jacks were in there? That got shot down, eventually. I don't know if it was legislation or not.I didn't have such an apartment or cable at the time, but I know people were screaming bloody murder about it.
I'm sure the kind of demographic that can afford cable modem access have more than one computer, usually. And they won't be too happy if this comes to fruition.
Well, only the Joe Average who hasn't already bought a LinkSys hub and is NAT-sharing the two computers in his house already -- an increaslingy common occurance. It's odd, they're pitching CAT technology as though people will think to adopt it when NAT is readily available now.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Why can't the morons just charge the subscriber based on the traffic instead of number of users.
I think this "I can hammer my line as much as I want" take on things is a misunderstanding born of a misreprentation. The cable companies advertise high bandwidth services, so those of us who are bandwidth hoars sign up with mainlining Kazaa in mind. In reality, what the cable companies are offering (hence the misrepresentation) is low-to-moderate speed bandwidth *burstable* to high speed.
/. readers) intentionally naive.
So your actual out-of-pocket in a cable modem economy is probably close to fair for the bandwidth you actually would end up using in a metered economy. My cable-modem hookup is *completely* dark 95% of the time. The other 5%, however, is spent with the expectation that a DVD-Rip of Planet of the Apes will slam into my computer so fast it dents the case.
So cable modem users should complain that yes, cable companies aren't being entirely honest with them. But they should also realize that if they expect to get a $1,000 per month T1 line for $40, they are being either unintentionally or (as I suspect is the case among our infrastructure-savvy
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
I work for a CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) Manufacturer as support manager and we've been kicking this idea around as well. Here is some of the reasoning behind that.
First, DOCSIS modems can handle upto 16 devices. I.E. you can hook up your cable modem to a hub and run 16 PC's behind one cable modem. If your operator hands out public IP's, he'll run out of IP's rather quickly. This is the only valid argument for additional fee's (per IP#). However, this can be controlled system wide in the CMTS with a simple setting.
The moment, a customer is using a cable modem
If bandwidth is the issue, the cable operator has to decide if they want to limit the amount of data transferred. They can already see how much each customer is sending/receiving, down to the last byte.
A smarter way is to install a proxy server, caching news server etc. For example, cache alt.binaries.pictures.* and you are downloading a GB a day and have your customers point to your news server and transfer 200GB over your RF network without impacting your pipeline to the internet.
Also, you don't want the operators to have too much too think about. Most of them are not too smart. Just get it up and running and don't touch it. Trust me, I handle support for those guys and you have no idea HOW dumb some of them are. And yes, there are some smart ones too.
When people use incorrect technical terms throughout an article. A hub that can do NAT, well then it is not a hub anymore is it. And "over-the-counter routing" that is an interesting term, did not know there was such a thing maybe, I should go pick up the over counter BGP solution for my redundant network. I also did not realize that NAT was a routing solution. I think I should go back and read my cisco books again.
"It doesn't work if you invite 'em in, Homer."
This post is exactly right. If all of you cable modem subscribers read your service agreement, it likely mentions "no guarantee of bandwidth". So what you're paying for is the service, not the bandwidth. To allow someone else to share your connection via a wirless network or other means is very much tantamount to "stealing cable" (as sumerized in the previous post). Or in this case, helping someone else steal it.
Having worked for two seperate cable modem service providers, I can tell you that they're hardly making any money as it is. If we want to see broadband technologies flourish (or even survive in places), some inconveniences (like fair pricing) will certainly have to be endured.
I'm sure many of you have seen those hilarious DSL commercials that cast cable-based broadband access in a bad "shared access" light. That's because the current Data Over Cable System Interface Specification (DOCSIS), 1.0, is a best-effort packet delivery system and thus has no guarantees for Quality-of-Service(QoS). Thus, the cable operator (MSO) has no way of throttling bandwidth, especially upstream bandwidth. That's why the MSOs don't like NAT and want to be able to bill their subscribers on a per IP basis. Enter DOCSIS 1.1, essentially a QoS add-on to DOCSIS 1.0 . With a DOCSIS 1.1 Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) sitting at the MSO's cable head-end and a DOCSIS 1.1 cable modem (CM) sitting at your house, QoS can be guaranteed. That is, the MSO can both limit you to a certain upstream and downstream bandwidth as well as guarantee a minimum upstream and downstream bandwidth. So, given a DOCSIS 1.1 deployment, I see no need for the MSOs to agitate customers with this intrusive CAT proposal, since they now have a way to bill you by bandwidth. Two months ago, the first set of DOCSIS 1.1 products were certified by CableLabs. However, I don't expect DOCSIS 1.1 deployment and replacement of DOCSIS 1.0 systems to happen in large numbers until the end of 2002. Another insider note: CableLabs, the entity pushing CAT, is funded by the MSOs, but has no authority to push its proposals into implementation. Only vendors building CAT products and MSOs buying those CAT products have the power to deploy this ludicrous CAT proposal.
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Uhm, Cable droids, that's what my firewall IS THERE FOR!!! Damn skippy you ain't gonna see what's behind my NAT device, you and every NetBus packing, snot-nosed, loser script kiddie out there. My provider has this little numeric string that can be used to gain access to my machines if need be: My phone number.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Leslie,
t m) , and by its similarly unbalanced technical details.
As an amateur networking enthusiast, I'm quite dismayed both by the unbalanced slant of your article on network address translation
(http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2001/1101/11d.h
You write for an industry magazine, and as such, it's very important that your readers have a clear understanding of the upsides and downsides of each type of technology.
Let me begin with technical details:
You do NAT a service by pointing out that it greatly simplifies routing. This is certainly true, and has allowed me to build my own home network, and thereby learn a great deal about networking.
However, this is overshadowed by a fact you neglect to mention, perhaps NAT's greatest advantage. By translating addresses, NAT allows home users to assign non-routed IP addresses to their devices. Non-routed means that Internet routers will send data packets to or from these IP addresses. This has great security implications. By assigning non-routed IP's, you greatly strengthen the security of that network - anyone attempting to attack machines within the network must first break through the NAT device. Hardware NAT routers have very few security holes, and therefore offer security to their consumers.
I would also greatly worry about replace NAT with a protocol with built in "holes". Not only is this an extensive violation of privacy - my information connectivity provider has absolutely no right to know whether my fridge is connected to my network, but worse yet, the ability to "see into" networks is an invitation to hackers to conduct attacks through these holes. I have no desire to have a hacker ask my fridge what's in it, or turn my stereo on. I am very dismayed that these broad questions did even merit mention as security challenges in your formulation.
Second, your interpretation that NAT is bad because it prevents cable providers from selling services they may like to sell is highly suspect. Additional IP address sales may be a perk for broadband providers, but by it is by no means the RIGHT of these providers to collect tolls for these IPs. A more apt analogy for NAT is that it makes broadband service like a telephone. One of the great advances when "Ma Bell" came when consumers could easily connect their own telephone to the wall, and not pay per unit. This resulted in explosive advances in technology and drops in cost for telephones - a huge service to consumers. If you believe that telcos should be able to charge per telephone in your home, perhaps you'd be willing to pay me those fees until the telcos can catch up.
I'm sensitive to the worry that the installation of NAT devices by end-users could result in very heavy loads on broadband providers, in return for minimal revenues. Furthermore, a wide open network behind a NAT device could result in a DMCA-generated liability nightmare if a user in a NAT-wireless "Neighborhood Area Network" decided to do something illegal or ugly.
However, this behavior can be controlled through strict terms on bandwidth monitoring, packet filtering, and license agreements controlling these elements of use.
While NAT does present some challenges to effectively providing broadband connectivity to home users, these challenges do not justify the intrusions into users' privacy and network security that you claim. I challenge the broadband industry to solve these problems in ways that help the consumer, rather than deprive her of her privacy and security.
Sincerely,
Eric
people could dispute. First is that there is anything illegal
about using NAT; Second is that what NAT is being used for is
unintentional. The gist of my complaint is that you could have
addressed the real issues without waving the red flags of "illegal"
behaviour and "unintentional" consequences.
To the first incorrect assertion: You claim that it is "illegal"
to use NAT. This has never been suggested or proven in a court of
law. It is not a "theft of service" in any event -- the service
of a single ip address to the subscriber is not being stolen from
the service provider. There remains only the single publicly
visible IP address. If there are restrictions in the SP ToS
limiting single computers to be connected, they would need to
be pretty carefully worded to rule out NAT use, and would at
worst create a ToS violation.
To the second point 8 years ago when NAT was created, there was
great concern about IP address shortage, which remains true today.
Contrary to your article, people were at the time very concerned
about the trend towards every electronic appliance in a house needing its
own IP address. NAT was one of the solutions to the problem.
Creating "sort of private, sub-network running datagrams to and
from invisible end devices" as you put it was the point of NAT.
The real issues for connectivity providers are (a) bandwidth
utilization by subscribers; (b) market penetration/revenue. (c) abuse
accountability. We can agree that a huge network hidden behind a NAT,
using a home cable connection provisioned for fractional use can use a lot
of unexpected bandwidth, but so can a spammer using a single machine, or
a teenager dedicated to downloading mp3s. So to address
issue (a) the problem is regulating traffic use in a way that offers
reasonable service to customers on low priced tiers with low provisioning.
This is a ToS issues with price/demand curve and competitive implications.
You don't have to drag NAT into the bandwidth hog issue at all.
Issue (b) is the penetration/revenue question: if one house buys the
connection and 802.11's the neighborhood, how does the installation pay
for itself? The answer is cruel: the service providers need to provide
enough value to justify subscriptions. If a shared connection using 802.11
is acceptable and worth $5/month, the service provider should provide a
supported, reliable $5/month service, not a $29.95 service.
In this case, tiered pricing (see issue (a)) may stabilize the
situation - if the neghborhood 802.11 connection is saturating the cable
connection
For abuse issue (c), the problem is that if someone drops into a private
802.11 domain and disrupts the network, who do you blame, and how do you
sanction them? The same as before, under ToS/bandwidth conditions.
In conclusion, NAT isn't a problem for which service providers need a solution.
SPs need bandwidth and abuse controls, and pricing commensurate to the
perceived value of their product in an area of rapid change. If one had
bandwith control, and the extra $4.95 month bought an additional increment
of allowed utilization, then there might be a value proposition that could
be tolerated by the public.
For the record, I had no access to ADSL or cable modem. I have a 144k
IDSL connection behind which I use NAT to attach 10 computers on my property.
I'm already paying for 24/7 use of my 144k, and I am completely guilt free.
cheers,
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Cable modem services don't support Linux. If you call them for help on anything but a Windows Machine (they dont even officially support Macs around here), they won't help you. So how do they plan to get their software running on your machine? Besides, you know people will find a way around this.
Around here, the cable companies are already annoyed by the fact that not everyone runs their cable modem through their proxy server or uses their software. And they already have a ridiculous source of income thanks to their $10/month modem rental fee (Btw, Linksys has a nice Cable Modem that is down to $100 now, which is cheaper than a year's rental fee.) and $8/month per additional IP charges. They don't need any more money because I want to have a third computer in my house.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I won't stand for them trying to charge me for additional IPs for every connected device. Having things like my printer networked inside my house doesn't cost them a dime, and it shouldn't cost me one either.
I have a cable modem. Connected to it, I have a firewall/hub. Connected to that I have my wife's desktop computer which is off mostly and an Apple Airport base station. I then have a laptop that uses Airport (802.11b) and my wife has a laptop that uses 802.11b. I life to surf the web sitting outside on the deck, or while in the family room, or from bed. I didn't want to have to pull cat 5 through the walls - so I got Airport. It's great. I have a password protected network. My neighbors aren't that close and aren't very technical anyway. I have no interest in sharing my bandwidth with them. Now, here comes the cable company saying I'm breaking the law! When I first got the cable modem, I needed to get an extra IP (one for the Airport base station, one for the desktop computer). I was willing to pay the $4 per month. The only way to order the extra IP was through a webform on their site which was broken. After spending *hours* on the phone trying to get them to fix the problem with *their form*, I finally broke down and spent the money on the firewall so that my wife could use her desktop computer without unplugging the Airport base station. It just strikes me as complete unfair that people who can't be bothered to provide working solutions for their customers them complaign when people do what is necessary to make their service useful. Jerks.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Personally, I'm using just my iBook 2000 - and in the apartment complex that I'm in I'd be nuts to go airport unless I was letting the neighbors in. Imagine the headaches. Those 2 AM door poundings over Quake lag... the microwaves and the building elevator alone would get a price on my head in no time...
I'm paying for bandwidth, not IP addresses - if I want to NAT the airport / masquerade a single address with a software router - what the hell can they care? If they can't support the bandwidth, then they should address that - remember every school gets a cable modem gratis and they certainly aren't hooking just one machine to it.
If the exta moneywent to upgrading gateways and proxy servers for the upstream of our cable modems, I could see their point - but I'll guarantee there's not linear relationship between the two, and I'll buy lunch to the first person who can prove they're installing hardware when enough people admit to having more than one machine. This is like the nonsense they went thru on multiple cable drops in your home. Charge for installation, charge for splitters, but essentially charging per seat makes music rights seem like fairy dust.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
OK, I don't see how this is relevant... I mean, they put a modem at your end, they go away. The method by which you share that IP and abstract it and create a private network at your house will never be visible to them, as long as you are not using THEIR box which has THEIR version of NAT on it. You don't have to... you can use what ever you want to accomplish this and they will never have a way of knowing... to them, it will look like a client PC. As far as they are concerned, they have given you one IP address. Who would be stupid enough to go out and by a gimped NAT box provided by the ISP so they can see how many IPs you have internally????
You can always setup a basic linux box with two NIC cards and run IP masquarading and voila!
I really see why this is an issue... I would never buy a NAT box provided by an ISP, nor would I need to use it... EVEN IF they setup NAT on my end using their gear, I would still put my IP masquarading box behind it and still abtract my network...
just my two cents.
-farshad
...and remember in your brain boggle, wrong starts with a wubble-u.
This is like the electric company charging me per light.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." --Unknown
You can have my router when you pry it from my cold dead hands!!!
So essentially, if I read this correctly, the proposed new network address translation protocol (CAT) would assign my internal addresses to me, and expose certain aspects of my internal network back to the cable provider, so they can provide me better service by charging me according to the size of my internal network.
Excuse me while I pick up my mind, I think it jumped out my left ear in protest at the sheer idiocy of the suggestion.
The security of my internal network is not negotiable. My file servers' samba shares, which hold my scanned documents, financial records, and other personal files are not viewable by my neighbors for a _reason_.
Well if they want me to house their CAT on my firewall, no problem. My primary firewall will be happy to house their stupid little protocol, and it can learn all about my internal network, right up until it hits the next machine down the line before the hub: The REAL firewall.
There's more than one way to skin this CAT.
Bastards.
1. 1 in 10 are using wireless to share with their neighbors? Get real. 1 in 1000 if you are lucky. But let's grant that it could be a problem.
2. NAT has other purposes than just sharing bandwidth. My cable company offers multiple IPs. I use NAT instead. Am I stealing bandwidth? No, there's only one of me on the net at a time. I don't *want* multiple IPs. I want a firewall, and NAT makes a very good firewall. The last thing I want is to have to make all of my machines internet-safe. Forcing customers to do so would create a huge security problem. Never mind your machines, what about your printer? You want that on the internet too?
3. Security. CAT will let your cable company peek behind your firewall--and who else?
One thing to be concerned about. Implementing CAT doesn't prevent people from using NAT. Therefore implementing CAT is not going to be sufficient, they'll have to force you to use CAT. And the only way they can do that is to put software on your machine (after all, you could always put NAT behind CAT). And we all know what platform that software will (and won't) run on.
Fortunately it's probably too late for this solution. They should just do bandwidth monitoring and leave it at that.
If my router is an OpenBSD box that refuses to connect to any incoming packet I don't initiate, wouldn't CAT be screwed? Or am I missing something?
In my neighborhood, Comcast owns a small box attached to the back of each house. It contains the cable line that comes in from the street, a 3-way coax splitter, and three cable lines that go to the three floors of the house.
... I live there already.
If I want to have cable TV in my bedroom and the rec room, I either have to pay Comcast an extra fee (so they can send a guy to screw the coax into the splitter box), or as you say, I can be a dishonest thief.
The place that your cable company wants to go
This also brings to mind another bit of history: in the mid-90's the telcos bitching about so many people using dial-up, and so they were lobbying to be able to charge per-minute on local calls. Despite the fact that they were probably getting more revenue anyway from people installing extra lines for faxes and computers at home (my uncle at one time had FOUR lines into his house, at one time I used to have two, and paid almost $60 for it). I fail to understand why a company can come up with a model that fails to take into account changes in the tide, and then make customers pay for their mistakes when things change...the telcos complained that they only have (or had) enough switches in some areas to accomodate only 40% of their customers to be on at any one time...how is that the CUSTOMERS burden if that is not enough when things change. It should, by law, IMHO, be 100% : I want the phone to work when I pick it up, regardless of whether there are people dialing up and staying online longer than normal phone conversations, or if there is an act of war like on 9-11...it should work, unless there is a physical failure somewhere. Same with cable companies: if they projected the average use of customers' use to be X, and it then moves up to Y, don't try to gouge people in stupid ways like this - figure out some kind of bar that if you go over, you get charged per GB. I *still* think that telcos were just out to royally screw everyone to be able to pay for their $#@$#% switches that they should have had in the first place.
If they are really so worried about profits, they shouldn't be giving executives big bonuses, and CEO's great big golden parachutes while laying off thousands of workers and screwing their customers. I'm really big on capitalism, but some CEO/executives make way more money than is justified, IMHO, for their ROI.
They want to protect the revenue stream from additional IP addresses. This will fail, because...
As soon as they have the ability to easily track bandwidth utilization, they will use that to drive the billing. Far better to charge per megabyte than to waste time trying to figure out how many toys the customer has and how many of them are really using the Internet. Besides, bandwidth measurements are [almost] fraud-proof, whereas this address counting stuff is a losing battle for them. They will use metered service to drive home the mother of all rate hikes, so that [among other things] AT&T can pay for @Home's sins.
Of course, metered service brings up the spam problem. Instead of the benign tolerance that most ISPs have, they will need a massive crackdown on spam unless they want all kinds of billing disputes regarding unsolicited bandwidth consumption. It's not just spam, there is also the issue of unsolicited pinging, port-scanning, and unauthorized telnet/ftp logins. If they want to measure my consumption, I intend to pick and choose which packets I pay for.
For the record, I set up my NAT-based LAN in the old days, when the cable company had no intentions of selling additional IP addresses. My continued use of this arragement is non-negotiable. I'll pull the plug before tolerating any of this CAT crap.
I wonder what these cable geniuses plan to do when they over-sell their IP allocations and need to take back the addresses. The whole concept of selling additional addresses is really wasteful. The government should have some kind of whopping tax (like 500%) on secondary residential IP addresses, so as to make the problem go away. The cable companies have never been great thinkers, they obviously need the governement to think for them.
Let them monitor the number of computers connected to their equipment. As long as I can still type ipnat -CF -f /etc/ipnat.rules, my FreeBSD firewall will still be the only machine plugged directly into the modem.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There is (was) money in hosting. People need access to the Internet to send data. You can warehouse your servers or you can rent thick-pipes (T1+) that gives you bi-directional bandwidth. Therefore, hosting companies buy large amounts of bandwidth (bidirectional) or are big enough to carry it themselves with peering.
Now home users want downstream bandwidth.
Solution? Buy the bulk bandwidth, and sell the upstream via hosting and the downstream via broadband.
It's not a rude situation.
If you want bidirectional bandwidth, you can get it. Get a T1 or SDSL at home.
It costs more?
Of course it does! Upstream bandwidth is expensive, downstream is cheap.
Therefore, ADSL is priced based upon the little bit of upstream used and you get a high speed downstream connection.
It's economics. If you want upstream bandwidth, buy it. You aren't entitled to it.
Alex
What happened is the inverse of the old Ivory soap story: Upon going to lunch one day, somebody forgot to turn off the mixer. An ordinary accident. The result was soap that floated: A good, marketable, accidental discovery. NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery. Its intentions were good; but one portion of its reality is clearly not so good.
Ok...
This really chaps me, here...
Sooo.... Something that is useful to a consumer is a bad, unmarketable discovery, and something, while fun to watch it float is a good, marketable discovery, but hardly useful to a consumer, aside from doing what other similar products alredy do, except they don't float, is absoulutely useless.
I don't understand the logic here. Exactly what oriface is this individual talking out of?
Sorry, but, at least I know that I can get a device that will easily allow me to share an internet connection among 2 computers in my house. To me, that's good. It's marketable, too!
What an absolutely asanine analogy!
Oh, I get it, it's bad for the consumer because it keeps the cable companies from digging deeper into a consumer's pockets.
What's next? The phone company charging me $5 a month to have a phone in my bedroom?
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
I don't think this is what the companies want
I can't speak for all ISP's, but (as I am the SysAdmin for a small ISP) I can speak for our company.
We DON'T want metered (pay per hour) billing, because metered billing is a pain in the ass. Keeping track of user's hours, and then going through your records because Joe Blow has disputed the charge ("I couldn't possibly have used that much time") just takes up too much time - as soon as a charge is disputed, someone has to stop what they're doing, and resolve it, so you've lost the $1.50 profit you were making off them in the first place.
At least once a month we get calls from people who want metered service, and we just tell them that we don't do that.
But the cable co's will simply drop your packets unless you install their special software.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
If I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, then it makes no difference whether the ISP expects me not to use it. It's mine, I paid for it.
The whole concept of "stealing" bandwidth is just plain ludicrous. When my ISP makes a bet that I won't cost them as much as they're charging me, it's not stealing when they lose the bet. It would be stealing if I were somehow tapping into their pipe illegally, but I'm not.
When an airline sells tickets, they always oversell, betting that not enough people will actually show up, and their "person bandwidth" will not be saturated. If everyone shows up for the flight, do they whine about stealing? No, the give you another flight, or refund your ticket.
Suppose I owned a business where customers would pay me $100 per month, and I would give them a 2liter of Coca-Cola whenever they asked. Just because I'm betting that nobody is going to ask for a truckload of cola doesn't mean that they're stealing if they do. I AGREED TO IT. I sold a Coca-Cola service, and they used it exactly as was said in the contract. I didn't sell them a maximum cola limit. I sold them unlimited cola, and they have a perfect right to collect.
The same holds true for bandwidth, and anybody who thinks that it's stealing when I get what I pay for, however seemingly unreasonable, is deluding themselves. If an ISP sells me a connection with a maximum bandwidth worth $300 per month for $40, well, sucks to be them. They sold it, and I'll use it.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
(Sorry for the length. Skip to the last paragraph if you want the really interesting bit.)
I use cable broadband provided by a startup called Astound. Astound is a subsidiary of Excel Energy, formerly Northern States Power, an electric company. They also provide telephone and cable TV service.
My town, St. Cloud, MN, is the first town they have provided service to. Recently, they have expanded to Contra Costa, CA. It has been interesting to watch their evolution.
Initially, they relied on a third party to provide Internet service--they only provided connectivity. Recently, they have taken the service in house. The original TOS stated that you could only have one computer accessing the Internet via the cable modem, but over time this prohibition has disappeared.
I have a Linux box doing firewall and NAT duty hooked to the modem. One day I was having problem renewing the lease on my DHCP address, and since I rely on the Internet for work, I called support. The first level of support, which was Astound, told me to unplug the modem, etc. and when that did not work they called Broadband Now, the third-party service provider. When the BBNow tech came on the line they ran some diagnostics and told me the modem was working but they couldn't access the computer. At this point they asked what operating system I was running. When I told them Linux, they said something to the tune of, "Oh. I understand," and dropped the lease from their end. Coincidentally, I never had any other problems after that, and the TOS changed soon after that too.
Now, I am not saying that I caused the change, but I am sure that Astound figured you have to choose your battles. Really, as people have already said, sharing bandwidth is not the same as sharing/stealing cable.
One last bit...About 5 years ago I sat next to the CEO of a regional electricity co-op on an airplane. He told me for the past 15 years all the new or replacement powerlines had been wrapped in fiber. When they did it they were not 100% sure what the fiber would be used for, but they figured it was a smart thing to do. When I talked to him, they were making their first moves into providing broadband access to their customers, which is exactly what Excel is doing with Astound.
No one will replace NAT devices with CAT devices! Cable companies used to charge for every TV connected to your home cable. Many no longer do. They only charge for additional cable boxes. (They can't control splitter's inside the home). Also wireless systems can now transmit "premium" channels from behind a single cable box to multiple locaitons. The article is silly, it equates multiple NATted IPs in the home with stealing via illegal "black" boxes or connections to the carrier. The problem is MOOT as others have stated since the cable companies can regulate the bandwidth you get and even offer premium services with greater and/or guaranteed bandwidths and public IP addresses.
In other words, porn. Things don't seem to have changed too much.
What a worthless article. I'm sorry I thought the whole thing sucked. I hate his anecdotes too. Anyway..
So NAT is bad, it's evil, we wish it didn't exist. Ok, it doesn't exist, so now I have to buy extra IPs for 4.95. Hmm, and then I'll hook those up to an 802.11b transceiver and sell cable modem access to my neighbors for 5.00 instead of 40.00-60.00 -- Hell, I'll even make a nickle!
Oh, well, 802.11b is evil too, we wish it didn't exist. And on and on... Ethernet is evil.. Electricity is evil..
Even with this CAT(??) junk -- who cares? Can I have a computer hooked up to my network? Then I can NAT! You can give me your CAT crap, I can hook up a Win98/Linux/etc box to it, and I can NAT behind it. What did this article accomplish other than spreading FUD about NAT making it sound like some sort of Napster scourge.
I love this statement: "NAT was also meant to simplify matters. Specifically, it was intended to simplify small business networks, so that the technologically-challenged small business owner could install and run IP address-sharing on a run-of-the-mill local area network, without having to go to night school to acquire a data communications doctorate."
Eh? Let's see I can just get a dozen IPs or I can get one and figure out how to share it with a dozen computers, yeah, that sounds simpler. Or, are there harder ways to do address-sharing?? Were small business owners hacking kernels until NATing came along? Or, or, were they secretly wondering where IPs came from and what fairy granted additional ones?
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Say I'm neighbor Bob and I get a cable modem and I set it up with wireless to share.
My friend Jeb figures its there he might as well use it. Even though he wouldn't have bought the cable modem in the first place.
Where is the revanue loss for the cable company?
Then again maybe this is my rationalization for getting mp3's and pirating software. I wouldn't buy it in the first place, so its not stealing if I use it.
Ironic how a police officer introduced me to this logic while he pirated my first game.
"Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller
The phone company was prevented from charging a 'per phone' additional charge, as was the cable company for trying to charge for 'multiple TVs'. Why is this any different?
If I were using their equipment and actually eating more of the company's IPs via dynamic assignment, then it makes sense to charge more. But if you are within your agreement for bandwidth and the connection (i.e. only one IP used and no piggy-backing), then it would seem illegal as a breach of service contract and privacy to look inside your home network and charge for every network device you route to internally.
This has got to be illegal, citing the phone company and cable-TV company for an example.
Your CAT NAT replacement technology is based on the faulty assumption that you're selling a 'subscription' to the Internet. That is an extremely cable providerish way of looking at things, and precisely the reason I avoid cable (and tell my friends to as well) like the plague.
What you're selling me is a connection to the Internet. You're selling me bandwidth. That's all you're selling me. That's it. You can't care what I have on the other end of the pipe anymore than the water company can care whether or not I have a dishwasher plugged in or water a neighbors lawn.
If you're basing your pricing and bandwidth provisioning on expected usage, it's cheaper and easier to implement traffic shaping and aggregate (as opposed to burst) bandwidth limiting than it is to develop a whole set of proprietary protocols that people will just get around anyway, thereby starting a technology war (which cable companies will ultimately lose) with your customers. Then you can charge people if they want to exceed your expectations. This model is enforceable, will be seen as reasonable, and doesn't require expensive proprietary and invasive technologies to implement.
I find it kind of amusing (and scary) how so many companies want to have broken business models, call customers criminals when they don't work, and try to implement invasive technological solutions that give the service provider immense control. It's stupid and wrong, and you should know better than to have written an article advoacting such iodiocy.
Cable will never enter my home until you guys get a clue and stop trying to make me into a passive consumer instead of a happy customer.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
There doesn't seem to be any real numbers as to how often this happens. In the 15-24 year old crowd, perhaps there will be more of this kind of thing. I own my own house, and while I can see this kind of thing happening if my close friends happen to live right next to me, I don't see it happening any other way. Mind you, I don't live in a big city, where perhaps a majority of people live in multi-tenant units. Here in the Midwest, there will be very little this kind of thing. We simply don't live in each other's laps that way.
While I consider my neighbors friends, I don't see Suzy Divorcee on my right, Bob Treecutter behind me and and the extremely procreative couple and thier many kids across the road from me forming an evil pact to bilk my cable provider out of money.
This is another example of a preceived problem that has no research to back it up. You can theorize all you want, but until you show me a definitive study showing that this is common, you can forget it.
if you can only use it for so long then you are screwed? they try to sell you on doing all these new amazing things with the speed, but then you find out that you use up your 10gb in a week dlin mp3s/game demos/trailers etc - and you are screwed. If they want to tone down the gayass advertising for DSL/Cable and let people know up front 'You can only take advantage of this speed for X amount of time then it will cost you $10000 extra after that'.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
yes, it's probably good to make people more conservation-minded of their usage, so that they don't sit around all day hogging bandwidth doing useless stuff unless they are over 25 years old and have real jobs that pay enough to feed the net-addiction.
of course, you have just shredded the business model of streaming media content providers and advert-based blogs.
CongGRATulAYtions! Ama-a-azing Skill!
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Who pays the bill when somebody launches a DOS attack against me?
Everybody and their neighbors are all using the network from 6-9 at night and so nobody gets any bandwidth. I on the other hand tend to be on after 11:00 at night. So the bandwidth I'm using costs them relatively less because of when i'm using it.
If you want to do billing for usage, what would be very cool is if you could have some sort of intelligent rate negotiation built into the network. So, I can set parameters in my router that will limit my network usage when it's at expensive high demand times and then crank it up when it's off hours. Part of that control could include detection of DOS attacks and could cut them off before they run up a bill. I'm a power user, and what I do on-line most of the time probably doesn't need more than 128-256Kbps average download speeds, but sometimes if I'm downloading something big (Linux ISO's, etc), It's nice to get T-1 speeds.
Also, perhaps you could vary the rates depending on whether traffic is outbound or inbound. I host my own website, DNS, etc, so I need a reasonable amount of upstream bandwidth. But even that demand is sporadic at best. I need short bursts of bandwidth but nothing large over a long period of time.
Tied into all of this intelligence should be a robust billing system at the provider. This would allow you to see your current usage, projected monthly usage, and resultant expected bill. If my bill is getting out of hand for the month, I can tell my router to trim back my bandwidth usage at peak times or whatever.
This is the kind of system that would make these services work properly. Right now, the problem is that the Cable companies are setting prices based on a certain assumed usage per customer. That usage varies, and if there is an external factor (increased use of NAT'ed 802.11b networks) that contributes to broad bandwidth usage increases, that effects their bottom line. The problem of course right now is that if they charge more, it has to be charged equally across all customers.
The cable company "solution" of providing their own alternative to NAT is bad. It seems to make the assumption that the number of devices connected is proportional to the amount of bandwidth used. One person running a 32 player counterstrike server on one computer will suck up way more bandwidth than the average family of four even if they all have computers.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
You think that's bad? Check this out - from our national telco :
a sp
http://www.bigpond.com/Broadband/cable/pricing.
3gig limit, 18.9c/mb after you've reached that.
That's $189 for an extra gigabyte of data!
There are accounts that have higher limits, but they're so overpriced no-one in their right mind would sign up for them.
Of course, there are other options (such as our local @home which has a "10x the average" limit), but they don't have very wide availability.
...this is getting out of hand
Also, if you pay for what you use, the Cable company suddenly has a financial incentive to come do repair work quickly. If you are offline, they aren't getting a dime.
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You Canadians must be insane. Only 5GB a month! LOL! You should just go back to using dialup at a flat rate! What's the point of having bandwith if it's prohibitive cost keeps you from using it!??!!?
NAT exists. Nothing the cable/DSL companies can do will cause NAT to cease to function (unless they do away with TCP/IP). So what's the point of CAT?
People who can't figure out how to turn on ICS or plug in a NAT box will call their ISP to ask for help. All the ISP has to do is say, "It'll cost you $10/month/machine to have more than one computer." Clueless person says OK and asks for 2 additional seats. ISP turns on the NAT function of their "modem" and sets it for 3 machines and tells them to plug it into their hub. Done. No new protocol. No new hardware. If they're using equipment that can't act as a router, they can send out a pre-configured, locked down linksys or DLink router set to provide access for 3 machines. They'll make up the hardware cost in a couple of months.
Here in Canada, the cable modem ISP I use sets a monthly transfer limit of 1 GB per month. I'm pretty sure I've gone over it a couple of times, but they haven't bothered me. I do keep the limit in mind, so I would never go over it by much (this doesn't seriously inconvenience me in any way, of course, since I don't use my computer as a server), and I suppose it's not worth their trouble to pester me over a hundred megabytes one way or the other.
However, if I regularly went much over the limit, they could easily demand that I pay an extra $10 per gigabyte. That would cover their cost, and would be quite reasonable to a heavy downloader like myself. If I tried to run a high-traffic webserver, or something like that, my transfer would go through the roof, and they'd insist I switch to another kind of account to cover the cost of upgrading the last-mile connection.
Very few people complain about the transfer limit, and I don't think it costs them any customers. On the other hand, people would be screaming bloody murder if they tried to control what you did with the connection. The user agreement is short and sweet, with only a few inexplicable IRC usage restrictions sticking out like a sore thumb. Basically: don't use it maliciously, don't do anything illegal, don't use more than 1 GB/month, and don't bug us about your home networking problems.
I really don't know why the other sort of bandwidth management is so common in the US; this way seems so much simpler.
swbell tried to get me to pay extra per pc, $10 extra as a matter of fact.
my response was to cancel service with them & migrate to cablemodem, if cablemodem does the same, well ill guess ill just migrate back to dialup.
thats the only justification to paying for broadband, is the ease of hooking up multiple machines, its not all that much faster. so if i cant hook up multiple machines, then i have no need for their service.
What do you mean granted? He didn't steal squat. Whether it was a flat rate or per use it doesn't matter. Whether he has his computer download warez all day, or whether he just uses email, and lets his neighbor download warez it doesn't matter. The useage fees have been paid.
Its like this. If the ISP is a sanitation company, and they give me a pipe to my house, and charge me for it. Whether a flat fee, or per gallon. Then it doesn't matter if I'm the only one pissing in the drain, or my neighbor pisses in it as well. As far as the company is concerned, its all my piss, and I'm paying for it.
Yeah...I have a 512K cable modem, and I can usually get around that. About the only high bandwidth I use is pulling down files from work.
Personally I like the low latency.
But, the damn cable modem gets addicted to one machine's MAC. My house is wired and if I wanted to use my notebook in the living room, it is about a 45 minute process to get the cable modem to understand that the machine behind it changed.
So, by using NAT, it is always just one machine to the cable modem...and behind the router, it is usually just only one machine on at a time anyway. I guess that makes me a thief.
Oh yeah...there is the other reason that I use NAT. Half the time if I don't keep the connection constantly going, when I go to get on, the DHCP server doesn't have any IP addresses left - so this way I don't have to worry about that. And THEY want to provide me more IP's?
If the Cable Companies want to charge for each computer, they should at least be consistant.
If have 2 televisions, but they charge me for one, does that make me a dirty thief?
What about my VCR? It has a TV reciever, so that's another conection they should charge seperately.
If I run sound out to my sterio, that's another connection. I have Dolby 5.1. Better charge extra for each speaker.
Sometime people watch TV with me. Better shake them down.
Your "jobless self" might reconsider living a lush lifestyle that drives you to spend all your money on computer hardware and electronic toys and cable television and then leave yourself unable to afford net access for your various gadgets.
The concept of Opprtunity Cost is universal to all decisions, all systems. It sounds like you may have simply misjudged the difference between your unlimited options and your limited resources.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
First off -- it is easy to use the anology that "it should be like electric" you pay for how much you use. Bandwidth should not be the service -- the connection should be the service. More bandwidth should be like premium cable VS. regular cable -- not like the difference in power drain between a 100 Watt light bulb VS. 40 Watt light bulb.
Having my cable modem run through the same wires as my cable TV....It would be a hard sell to me to pay for bandwidth rather than the regular monthly fees....Could you imagine having to pay a "pay per view" type fee for every channel on cable....IE -- that will cost you $4.95 to watch that Star Trek Rerun on TNT.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
All the reaction I see to this article is negative and whiny - "I paid for my 2Mb/s, and I'm going to use it ALL!"
That's a pretty poor attitude, if you ask me. You are sharing some large ISP pipes with thousands of other people. By being a "bandwidth hog", you are not only cheating the ISP (it's still wrong to mistreat a criminal), but cheating your fellow netizens.
Sure, it sucks that there are people out there thinking that ISP customers are acting like criminals, but if we all acted responsibly, there might not be as much of this thinking going around.
For me, broadband is about being able to get information faster, but not about being able to run gnutella 24/7 and fill up my hard drive for the sake of doing so. It simply makes it more convienient for me to surf the Internet and do some telecommuting.
For all of the community-mindedness of the Open Source crowd, this seems like a backward step. There is responsibility with freedom, and the greater freedom of a fat pipe to your house comes with the obligation to use it in a reasonable manner.
Sure, when I get my DSL, I am going to hook up a few computers to it and NAT. My wife's computer, mine, and the kids all would benefit from a shared 'net connection. But, I doubt we will abuse the pipe.
If you want to run a porn site/mp3 stream or leech music 24/7, get a T1 to your house. Otherwise, just be responsible and considerate. It's not about the ISP. It's about those who are using the same service.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
Speaking of 802.11b usage between neighbors *ahem*... Can anyone point me in the direction of instructions on how to increase the range of an Apple AirPort? Just for curiosity's sake .
Actually, the real problem is that access providers don't guarantee any amount of bandwidth or any kind of reliability, while their advertising and sales department sell hype. They don't even provide information about much bandwidth and how many users they actually have. Blaming the consumer for this seems rather twisted to me.
If everyone does max out their bandwidth all the time, then they'd be forced to actually charge you for the full bandwidth - likely it'd be significantly more than you currently pay.
That's a bogus argument. Access providers know full well what kind of bandwidth per customer they can support and how oversubscribed they are. If that information looked good to consumers, you can bet they would share it. The logical conclusion is that because access providers are not making this information public, customers must be overpaying, not underpaying.
Dear Leslie Ellis,
I just finished reading your CED article regarding NAT and cable modem service, and I would like to throw my viewpoint back at you (as countless others have likely already done, since your article was mentioned on Slashdot today).
I think you clearly and rightly stated your comparison of NAT to cable TV theft. In this argument, I would not accuse you of expressing only the point of view of the cable company, because you are also addressing some simple concepts of what is fair.
However, I think the analogy to cable TV theft is an inaccurate representation, and that it makes some assumptions as to the service being purchased by "Customer Bob" that doom him and his neighbors to being defined as abusers.
In the world of TV cable theft, sharing your subscription with your neighbor had no detrimental effect on your own service, unless you were bad at splicing and damaged your own connections; the neighbor's stolen cable would normally be identical to the service to which paying subscribers were entitled. There was no noticeable issue of bandwidth.
However, in the world of cable modem service, the subscriber is renting a connection and purchasing bandwidth from the cable company. Unless prohibited (some would say arbitrarily, or in a slippery attempt to hedge off potential revenue loss) in the service agreement, it is not dishonest for Customer Bob to share that single connection and bandwidth with his neighbors, as he is not consuming ISP resources that he would not otherwise potentially have used. Bob's sharing of his own connection and bandwidth is very different from Bob somehow jury-rigging an independent cable or DSL connection at his neighbor's house using his neighbor's own cable or phone line.
Should such a standard as CAT be implemented, I would certainly hope that the cable companies using it would reduce their rates as they applied to single computers, as they would be reducing the service provided and severely limiting the customers' options as users of that reduced service.
Please understand that I approach this issue from the viewpoint of my own NATted network, all within my own home, using a DSL connection, with an ISP who has no qualms with the full usage by customers of their paid service.
Thank you for your presentation of this issue, and thank you for your attention. This reply is also being posted to the Slashdot thread where your article's URL appeared this morning.
David A. Mason
david.mason@miis.edu
Network Administrator
Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute for International Studies
http://cns.miis.edu/
Having three computers behind a router hooked up to a time warner road runner modem would make me a thief of more than $15/month. Time Warner wants $15 per additional IP per month. I guess that makes me a thief of $45/month. As if the digital cable wasn't already expensive enough (and lower in quality).
Whoopdie-freaking-doo. What they fail to mention is that there is _ZERO_ ability to block someone from putting a real NAT behind their bogus "Cable-NAT" and continuing to do the exact same thing.
I'd say "since when does /. post this kind of sales tripe", but the answer is "since day one."
--Dan
But if a fast pipe is open all the time, the math doesn't work out for access providers, since a few people can saturate the whole backbone connection.
The solution? Charge by volume. Have a peak and an off-peak tariff. Works for electricity.
I think current cable services are more analogous to an all you can eat buffet. Whilst at&t give me 10mbps they assume that i wont eat it all, just like restaurants assume their is a reasonable limit to how much pizza one can consume.
I'd imagine that most restaurants would disapprove of two people sharing an all you can eat buffet.
Unfortunately we have no choice with cable and I'd be far more in favor of a decent pricing scheme:
Why not limit users to a few gigs and make it per gb after that?
Why not make it free in the dead of night, so i can cron my new distro downloads and incur the minimum impact on my cableco's network?
Why not make communication within the cableco's own network free and enfore the upstream cap at boundary router level. That way we could open up a gnutella network for our cable region and all the warez, pr0n and mp3 traffic would stay within their network - saving them plenty bandwidth.
Whilst i'm not enthralled at the idea of limited bandwidth, by providing a few concessions i'm sure they could make a lot of us bandwidth-hungry-/.-crowd jump to a metered plan. i know i would
How come they're never around when you need them?
+1, Funny, for what it's worth.
I do agree that it would be a horrible situation for the companies to try and charge by the byte.
The obvious solution is to make the person that initiated the connection responsible for paying. Telco's already use this solution. I think one of the big advantages of this model is that it would really cut down on virii, spam, etc..
For example, if your computer was actually costing you money by hosting a virus and trying to send it out, then you would definitely find a way to stop passing on the infection.
If it cost real money to spam people, then someone would think twice before they spammed you. Currently, it costs them nothing to spam loads of people, with this model they would have to pay.
If you've ever looked at a Qwest, SW Bell or At&t bill you fully understand this rule:
Never, ever let your telephone company or cable TV provider be your ISP. They will fuck it up every single time, over and over again no matter how much they tout that they are #1 or they have "changed".
Why on earth would anyone think that these companies' internet services would be any better than the phone or TV service they already so poorly deliver (just think if how large AT&T is!). Not to mention all the crazy billing line items and "fees" they charge that make no sense what-so-ever. My favorite is the $10 change fee, whether you add or subtract services. It's nickel and dime racket for sure, and so is this.
-s
I pay for one connection. And how many computers are connected to my cable modem? ONE. So where is the violation? Please define connection for me. Look at all the packets leaving my computer. They are all originating from exactly one PC.
The rest is protocol, and none of the cable company's business.
Technically speaking, having two computers networked together with NAT and browsing, is no different then only one computer browsing with two windows open, with one of them being remoted with RDP to the other computer. Hell, for that matter is is no different than one PC with 10 windows open, all browsing different sites.
Should the cable company start charging me per session too? Hell, I have 3 windows open right now, should I be charged extra? Heck, I have two monitors on my PC, should I be charged more, because I can have two fullscreen sessions?
Its like this. Lets say I only get one email account that I pay for. I tell all my friends to email me, just put my name in the subject. If its for my wife put her name in the subject. If its for our kids, put their names in the subject, etc etc. Now one email account is serving three people. I paid for that one account, so it doesn't matter. Am I to be billed for three people now? How will they know? Its just a protocol. They can never tell what the protocol is for sure. While it may look like NAT, it could be something else. Just like the above email I described. How do you know this isn't the email sharing protocol, vs another spam email, or some other email? You don't/can't.
And you are right. My arguement WON'T get ten seconds in a court of law... BECAUSE THE CASE WOULD BE DISMISSED BEFORE YOU CAN SAY FUQ!
Plus, one user running a constant audio/video stream is going to use a lot more bandwidth than 100 neighbors intermittently jumping onto my AirPort to check their email. This sounds like yet another case of a solution in search of a problem trying to sell itself.
Thus, the cable operator (MSO) has no way of throttling bandwidth, especially upstream bandwidth.
Then how is @Home able to "cap" the upstream and downstream bandwidth for home users vs the "@Work" business users? Plus, the @Home system used to be pretty uncapped on the upstream, but then was capped severely...
Can you point to information regarding this? Is it possible to uncap from the client/consumer/user side? What limits this?
If you don't want to reply to this thread, email me.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Don't the ISP providers themselves purchase a hunk of bandwidth and IP ranges that they then partition and redistribute, offering themselves as middleman for support and value-added services?
So what happens on my Linux box running NAT/firewall for my three VMWare sessions (Win98/NT/2000)? I'm still running one piece of hardware with four internal IPs on it, but only one realworld IP to the cable company. So now I'm supposed to pay for four devices?
Oh wait, if they set up a piece of physical hardware that prevents NAT, then that means I can no longer connect to the network via my VMWare sessions?
What the hell?!?
Did you read my post? All those computers are connected to ONE PC, which is connected to the cable modem. ONE PC, ONE CONNECTION, NO VIOLATION.
In terms of network traffic, those many windows open on one PC looks identicle to the traffic from ONE NAT Server with many nodes. Basically that NAT server is doing things on behalf of other PCs. This is no different then if you call me on the phone and ask me to look up driving directions to K-MART, I look it up, and tell you. Same thing... Should AT&T then send me a bill for acting as a middle man for you?
Maybe you will understand better this way. I pay for garbage service. I get charged by the can. Lets say I don't have very much garbage this week. My neighbor has a party at his house and has tons of garbage. I take some and put it in my can, so it is now up to the brim. Should the sanitation department charge me extra for that? I paid for my bandwidth (The one can full).. And if I decided to take all my neighbors garbage, I would get charged for each can. But does this mean they can charge me an additional fee because its my neighbors? Hell no. Where the garbage came from is none of their business. Are they going to send a guy to my house to look through my garbage to try and make a determination? If so, I'll be sure to have everyone in the neighborhood that week take a crap into a plastic bag, and put it in my garbage can.
The hypothetical numbers this articles uses are priceless examples of industrial chicanery: "Let's say one in 10." No, let's not say one in ten. Let's be realistic instead.
Maybe I should make a case that I was transferring protected data that was encrypted and protected with an algorithm that shall remain nameless. Since the cable company was able to determine the content of my traffic, that means that by the DMCA they illegally circumvented my protection measures.
Lots of businesses have a mismatch between their pricing and cost structures. Think about airlines- the big $$$ are the airplane leases, fuel, etc... which exists no matter how many seats are filled on the plane. Hotels. Restaurants. Satellite TV. The mapping between cost and pricing can be very indirect, and managing that well compared to the competition is ultimately what makes these companies succeed or fail.
It's always better for the company to have a pricing model that maps directly to the costs- the reduces the management challenge, and reduces risk. It's in many cases bad for the customers- they get nickel and dimed. Where there is competition, simpler, more consumer-friendly pricing models tend to win. But telcos culturally still think and behave like regulated monopolies (which many of them effectively still are -- I've only got one high-speed access option at my address), and they exercise their power over the customer to price in a way that is most favorable for them.
Theoretically, "pay for what you use" can be more fair for the majority of users who don't use much. But do you really think that cable or DSL companies are going to lower their base rates if and when they figure out how to put the screws on the high-bandwidth users? That seems pretty unlikely to me.
Let me see if I have this straight... I'll assume for the time being you're using Windows because in my experience, RR won't touch Unix. You call Road Runner, which your brother pays for, because you didn't remember ipconfig/winipcfg. You ask them how to get an IP address on a system that they never installed their client on. You all but admit to using multiple systems with their service, which is a big no-no in most of their service areas without paying for the privilege. Worst of all, you called them to ask rather than take the time to RTFM. All you need to do is search for it. It's the second hit on a search of the help for "release IP address", first hit on "renew IP address".
After all this, you whine about them asking a lot of questions about the system? Remember: Most clueful people would sooner choke themselves with cat5 than they would work first level support for a consumer ISP. The way I see it, you were fortunate that you got your question answered so quickly. Most first level people are doing good to pronounce the things they see in the checklist properly, let alone answer something that's not on the troubleshooting flowchart.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
I don't get it.
:) )
:) :) :)
@Home already rents IPs out for $4.95 a month.
Sure its a max of 3, but shit, thats why I am setting up a NAT, if they offered me more I'd pay it, alot less trouble on my end (I'll pay for some convienence
Long as I get to keep'em static, I love my static IPs
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How much of a problem is this really? Not that many people are going to let their neighbors have unfettered access to their network. I sure wouldn't. I can just see the Secret Service kicking in my door when some goober neighbor threatens the President via my IP. Not to mention them downloading child porn and nuclear weapon plans, while sharing software from companies who are known for their attack-shark lawyers. I think most people who have the brain cells to put a wireless network together are going to realize these drawbacks and have the same reaction.
The model of bandwidth as commodity already exists: Power. You can put deals and caps on it, but its merely metered usage of bandwidth over time.
.NET sucking every Office function through the wire dynamically. Trust me, Bill's gonna come out with a "deal you can't refuse" that combines cheaper metered bandwidth with a catch.
You have a "max pipe size" you pay for. You also have a $/unit of measure charge. Flat, tiered or what-not you are going to be using metered bandwidth.
This is fine for device connectivity (believe it - they WANT you to use bandwidth), but here's the real knot in the panties for this model: On the web - you start paying for all the freakshow ads, intros, spam and other fluff spinning around there. Don't like it?
Start migrating towards smarter and more extensible programs to purge nonsense. And thus we have arrived at the mouse vs. trap circle we are in now, but YOU have a wallet that is concerned.
The sick part is that these providers WANT to shove fluff through the pipe to you in a metered bandwidth model. Hell, you're paying for it. It becomes just another level of service comparison. "How much shite will you email me...in MB?"
Think about this combined with the Gatesian World of
And WHAMMO we have arrived. Portal, bandwidth deal, and protocol support all bundled. Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, ATT, Dell, IBM, Your Mom's Poker Club all selling services. We have this today, but its not TIME that they rob from you ("hey 1/3 of my time is downloading NetZero ads") - its true $ ("hey 1/3 of my GB meter is crap Earthlink email").
mug
+/-
I've had just about enough from you, Mr Man.
The statement that the cable companies are losing $30 million a year because of NAT is totally bogus. The assumption is that people using NAT at home would be willing to pay $4.95/ip/month if only the policy could be enforced. I am by no means a bandwith abuser (much lower than the average /.er, I am sure), but if I was asked to pay per ip for my machines, I would switch providers.
How much do you download? I certainly don't use only 3mb a day. I figure I download 5-7 gigs a month. Is that a lot more than the Cable company expects me to?
The fact of the matter is that $5 per computer per month ain't that bad as long as you're sharing with a roommate or someone. $50/ month sucks, so I split it with three people. Works out to about $17/month each, which is totally worth it. If I actually paid the additional $10, it would be $20/month for each of us. Of course, when I was living at home and we had 3 computers, the additional $10 would be a deal breaker. In a single family household, not everyone is downloading the same amount. Why download the same 500mb file on all three computers when you can just send it over the network much faster after downloading it once?
Now, sharing your connection with the entire apartment complex.... that's probably not helping the situation.
WTF? Have the writers of this article SERIOUSLY CONFUSED the definition of "dishonest", or do they really belive this shit?
The internet was designed peer-to-peer. People use it peer-to-peer. Oh dear, they seem to have committed the crime of not paying the telecos. Why? Well because the telecos control the US law why not.
The only way they could possibly implement something that works, would be to rely on "trusted clients." They would have to break compatability with IP and use a "decommoditized" protocol, which OpenBSD wouldn't know how to talk (but MS Windows would). This would be in concert with new laws (DMCA probably wouldn't cut it) to allow them to crack down on reverse-engineering and interoperability projects.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
He's not running a coax to his neighbor attached to a splitter on his cable line. He's running an RJ-45 connected to his hub. So again I ask. WHERE IS THE VIOLATION? What he is doing is no different then if their kids ran a string across the yard with tin cans on each end.
The cable companies can't even provide adequate support today for people with a single machine plugged right into their cable modem. How the fuck does anyone think they're gonna be able to support home LANs? Throw more tier-1 script monkeys at the problem? Feh! Won't work, and all the profits they hope to squeeze out of us NAT users would have to go to pay all those added people. And if they can't provide support for something but want to charge extra for it, nobody will stand for that.
The cable companies can go piss up a rope, as far as I'm concerned. They already limit the amount of bandwidth that I can use at any given time, and that's enough. I will use it on as many different machines/devices as I see fit.
Next thing you know, they'll try to make my friends who don't have cable TV wear blinders when they're in my house and the TV is on.
~Philly
(And there's about 200 posts here telling you that you aren't buying bandwidth [or 'cans'], so try reading them.)
didn't I just say it didn't matter? Whether I pay for how many cans they pick up, or just the fact that they come to my house to pick up the cans, I still paid for the service, so if its my garbage or joe blow's garbage it doesn't matter, its all just garbage.
It seems that the cable companies' fear of customers dropping in 802.11 base stations is a fear of competing with their own customers.
If the cable company can't offer a competitive service, then nobody will use it.
It seems to me this is simple capitalism. Whats the problem here?
But consumers don't like it.
You get situations like this, and you discover that if you do what all the advertisements seem to say is the advantage of their high-speed solution (insert graphics of speeding progress indicators and streaming video here) your bill mounts up quite quickly indeed.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
It's not about technology.
It's not about fairness.
It's always about power. Always.
I'm unclear on what the Cable companies are really objecting to.
Is it:
a) NAT
b) 802.11b
c) Customers who use too much bandwidth
The wireless network issue seems to be a red herring thrown in to provide justification for attacking NAT. It's pretty clear that they're actually more concerned about families and small businesses using NAT to connect multiple computers to a single cable modem. It's only natural that a broadband connection be used this way. As others have pointed out, the cable companies are thinking like cable companies (funny how that works).
I love the claim that CAT will allow these companies to provide better customer care. They don't seem to understand the basics of IP networking and now they want to implement a proprietary protocol to assist them in troubleshooting devices on my network! Right.
It's clear these companies have gotten themselves into a business they don't really understand. This article is the best argument for DSL that I've run across in a long while.
I read the whole thing, and I fail to see her point. Carol and Ted aren't stealing anything from GreedyCable. Bob paid for the bandwidth you provided him. Carol and Ted and Bob are using what you sold to Bob. They're not using excess IPs from GreedyCable, either. They're sharing about 4 Mb/s of internal network bandwidth (if any security at all is turned on in the 802.11b access point). Bob may or may not get 4 Mb/s from GreedyCable in a download. My experience is that after-dinner bandwidth is about 800-1200 kb/s on cable, far less than the internal NAT'd network provides.
Cable companies, DSL providers, and even dial-up providers all sell bandwidth. Not content. AOL (the author's putative ISP) doesn't sell content. They sell bandwidth and filtering (i.e., they filter what's on the Internet, and spoonfeed it to their customers).
Nothing prevents someone with a dialup analogue modem from setting up an 802.11b wireless access point on their dialup connection (Apple's AirPort even has a modem built-in).
If Bob buys a gallon of milk, and gives Carol one quart and gives Ted one quart, the retailer still has been paid for a gallon. You're implying that Carol and Ted have stolen milk, which is obviously not the case. Water companies sell water by volume, not per-faucet hydronics fees. Cable companies generally have volume restrictions for monthly use, with fees for overlimit consumption.
NOW, if Carol or Ted go back to the dairy or retailer to complain about spoilt milk, THEN she has a point. However, in the bandwidth scenario, they'll call Bob (who's adept enough to help them configure their 802.11b NICs to access his AP).
Gee, now that I think of it, cable companies buy bandwidth from backbone providers like WorldCom, and resell it! WorldCom should be angry: some of their customers are reselling (not sharing) what bandwidth they purchased from WorldCom! The nerve!
--altadel
Dear Mrs. Ellis:
I have to respectfully disagree with the tone of your recent article covering NAT and CAT. It seems to me that you have made many of the typical errors when considering bandwidth sharing and its consequences.
Your argument seems to be that cable modem subscribers using NAT to attach additional devices to the network are thieves, and CAT will put a stop to all of this. You use words like "illegal", "sin", "steal". While your argument does seem to be shaded towards the people that share with their neighbors, you unfairly focus the spotlight on NAT and completely ignore the fact that in most cases, cable modem subscribers that use NAT within their own households do so without violating any service agreements.
Careful examination of of a typical Acceptable Use Policy (I will use @Home's as an example) shows that sharing your cable modem with the neighbors is not allowed:
"@Home residential customers may not resell, share, or otherwise distribute the Services or any portion thereof to any third party without the written consent of @Home."
However, nowhere in this policy is sharing your cable modem among multiple computers within your own household prohibited.
Your mistaken assumption that the cable modem providers only allow one machine per IP address leads to a VERY irresponsible assessment of the losses involved with this sort of "piracy". You state:
"Let's say one in 10 of the 5 million U.S. cable modem subscribers are usurping IP addresses without paying the $4.95 per month fee that's typically charged (beyond a pre-specified limit, which varies MSO to MSO.) Right off that bat, that's just shy of $30 million lost, annually. "
I can appreciate your attempts to scare cable provider executives into jumping on the CAT bandwagon, but I have to say that the decision makers who believe you will be shooting themselves in their collective foot. You said it yourself - there is no way to detect NAT. Therefore, you're not going to keep people from using it. To try and strong-arm end-users into believing they have to use a big-brotherly technology such as CAT is foolish, and will do nothing more than push them toward other high-speed internet providers.
You also make several assumptions regarding an individual's privacy with respect to network-savvy consumer electronics gear. You say that, "With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won't be able to see into all connected devices, making remote troubleshooting difficult." Has it occured to you that perhaps subscribers don't WANT their cable company examining what television shows they have stored on their TiVO, or what music they have on their MP3 jukeboxes?
In summary - you make many irresponsible and illogical arguments regarding NAT, arguments that belie your misunderstanding of the situation. If you would take more care in formulating your views, you might be a Technology Officer instead of a Technology Analyst.
Sincerely,
John Thorensen
Where does it say that it is illegal to network computers together? Where does it say it is illegal to string cable to your neighbors house? It is only illegal if said cable is a COAX cable which is SPLICED into your cable line.
Running a separate cable/network is not covered.
They'll come up with some client software that will be required on any LAN device you want to have Internet connectivity. The client passes a checksum unique to each LAN device it's running on, to the cable company for authentication. You will be billed extra according to how many different unique checksums (i.e. devices) are authenticated from your IP address each month. If you try to connect with a LAN device not running that client software, the packets will be blocked or ignored.
They'll also slap some cheesy encryption into the checksum-generation part of the client software-- just enough so it falls under the DMCA-- and just so people will be prevented from reverse-engineering it and spoofing the authentication server. This way, they'll be able to prosecute spoofers for DMCA violations as well as fraud, which they hope will be a major deterrent.
Don't be surprised if Microsoft supported an initiative like that, because if the Mac/Linux/whatever versions of this client software lagged behind the Windows version (as most non-Windows versions of software tend to do), that's something that could be turned into a huge deal by Microsoft's PR people.
~Philly
I used to work for an ISP. About 2 years ago, they were gearing up to sell DSL service. We had all the big meetings, and at one point the subject of Subscription Rates came up (how many customers to each T-1's worth of bandwidth). The idiots at the corporate level said 250/1. I almost lost it. This is the reason for the article, not the fact that there may be 5 systems on my network. They started out with a bad pricing plan to establish a market, and now they are loosing money.
Now, I have no problem if they come to me and say, "We cannot continue to offer service at this rate ($??), the new rate will be ($??)". This will allow them to stay in business and provide a service, but to try and generate more revenue based on hype and FUD will not work.
The oversubscription that the phone companies do is perfectly legitimate because phones WORK. Except in emergencies, when was the last time you picked up a phone and DIDN'T get a dial tone?
Obviously, during major crises the system gets overloaded, but I find that quite acceptable personally.
This is entirely different from the ISP method of oversubscribing, where often things DO NOT work -- in fact sometimes you can even say 'usually don't work'.
Give me dial-tone reliability -- ie, deliver exactly what you promise to deliver -- and you can do any goddamn thing you want on the backend. If you have trained monkeys carrying packets on bicycles, I don't care, as long as it works.
The present situation, on the other hand, is execrable.
I have one thing to say to cable companies, You are replaceable! Forget the idea of being able to charge per device and have control only IPDroids druel over; high speed wireless networked computers will enable people to replace High speed adsl/cable service alltogether!
YOu better stop trying to force your will on US through congress, or you'll really understand what a commodity market is all about, ie.. squeeze people enough, and they will figure out how to rid themself from your arms!
Who is technology for anyway? The consumer, or the IPDroids?
You said its in the contract.
here is a TOS for ATT. Where does it say you cannot network your computers together?
The closest I can find is it says you cannot provide network services via the @home service. Key word here being via In this scenarios, we are NOT providing network services via @home. @home isn't even in the picture. We are providing network servies via your favorite Router/NAT application/device. @home is not taking part in any of the sharing. Your PC is just acting on behalf of other devices. Just like if you call me on the phone, and ask me to look up something for you. Thats how NAT works. You say you want to do operation X, and the NAT server will say, "ok, let me do that for you. And I'll tell you what the other computer said"
Sharing means, the server would have to say, "here is a network line. talk to the computer your damn self"...
This scenario would require your server to actually be a bridge. But a NAT server is NOT a bridge.
Some of the terms are just plain stupid. Like you can't run a server of anykind. Including HTTP. Guess that means we can't run Windows XP/ME. Both implement UPnP Services, which contain embedded HTTP Servers. Guess this means you can't buy UPnP Devices either, like your internet enabled toaster/refrigerator/etc, because all UPnP Devices have embedded HTTP Servers. Guess you can't use Desktop Remoting either, becaues that runs an RDP server.
What if I run my cable modem and a wireless network, and have a whole bunch of X clients, and have my neighbors all running their own X servers, running MY clients (e.g. Netscape)?
In theory, all the Netscapes are running on MY computer....it is only the DISPLAY that gets transferred thru 802.11b.
Would it constitute to "stealing"?
Le robinet de chatte de chat de baise sucent le twip gai de fag de larve de trou d'âne de piss de dick de shit
If they expect users to actually use this thing, then they have two choices:
1) make it mandatory
force all users to upgrade to a CAT modem, advertising "use more than one computer at a time!" If this happens, it better be a protocol that contains blacklists and spyware to keep NAT off ALL the machines behind it. I forsee Hell freezing over before a protocol gains acceptance that can detect one daemon running on a completely separate network segment over a possibly heterogeneous LAN, especially if that daemon is running on a completely foreign operating system. And I'll be damned if someone doesn't make an invisible hardware device that does NAT -> CAT.
2) make it more appealing
make the protocol a mini IPv6. Build some sort of proprietary addon to IPv4 into the protocol that allows a socket to directly address a machine on a translated subnet. This would break IPv4, so it probably won't happen. But then again, this is an industry that probably wouldn't care less about breaking IPv4 if it makes money.
-Lx?
http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2001/0801/08a.htm#s b
/.ers rambling about the cable companies wanting to treat the internet as a service they can exert control over instead of being common carriers was paranoid hokum, just check this out. Instead of trying to pass legislastion at the federal level, they're going state to state like UCITA.
If you thought
"Expands the definition of "telecommunication service" to include, but not limited to, all electronic data, video, audio, Internet access...."
"Expands the definition of "unlawful telecommunication device" to include any telecommunication device that is capable of facilitating the disruption, acquisition, receipt, transmission or decryption of a telecommunication service without the consent or knowledge of the telecommunication service provider. (Examples include any "device, technology, product, service, equipment computer software or component or part thereof" that is "primarily distributed, sold, designed, assembled, manufactured, modified, programmed, re-programmed or used for the purpose of providing unauthorized disruption of, decryption of, access to or acquisition of any telecommunication service.")"
They have no control over anything past the IP address that they assign to the outside interface on my firewall. With IPFilter and IPNAT, I can connect as many devices as I want, and they'll never know the difference.
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be an embargo on hooking up the neighbours, or running a radio LAN for my apartment building. Well, there is the following which says I can give it away, but not charge for it...:
Reselling. You agree not to resell RCN services or products without an express written agreement with RCN to do so.
And this one, which seems reasonable, but I hadn't realised it was written into the service agreement:
Support Abuse. You agree not to harass, threaten or abuse authorized representatives of RCN, including but not limited to tech support representatives, customer relations representatives, and sales representatives, or otherwise abuse RCN's support services.
I also found the following which confused me (under "Abuses")
Scrolling. You agree not to cause the screen to "scroll" faster than other subscribers or users are able to type to it, or any action to a similar disruptive effect on or through the Access Service.
What the hell is "scrolling" in this context??
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
hmm... let's look at my, the customer's choices
keep using my linksys' nat; screw the cable company
pay an extra $5 a month for the same thing
the choice is obvious
Private networks have a very valuable and appropriate place in the home network. As more of our appliances (mp3 jukeboxes, home entertainment systems, etc.) become smart, the need for NAT and the private home subnet will only grow. Cable companies would be much better served if they took into account the appropriate use of this technology when they advise customers, as they do, to set up a home networks. Such an approach would take broadband providers learning some new things, but ultimately they will be able to provide customers with information that will allow them have secure, private local networks within their homes, while realizing the powerful potential of a networked home environment. Ultimately, that approach makes the broadband service more valuable to the consumer. Rather than getting caught up in tracking down every nickel and dime, the broadband industry would be better served helping users realize the power of their service. I thought the cable industry learned this lesson a few years back when they stopped trying to charge per TV connected to the cable and focused on providing compelling, value-added levels of service that attracted the consumer to purchase programming packages and then hook up as many TVs as their home coaxial network would support. Keep your eye on the prize, provide a valuable utility to homes so that broadband moves from a luxury item to a necessity. Can you imagine if the electric company charged by the number of appliances with plugs in the house? People would be counting appliances and weighing each electrical appliance purchase instead of coming to believe that electricity is a necessity and reinforcing the belief by purchasing more and more appliances that depend on ubiquitous access to electricity in their home. Since electric companies charge by bandwidth used (not plugs in the house) they do not penalize people for getting more electric appliances, they only charge them for the power used. This approach increases dependence on electricity and has grown the market for electricity in ways the a protectionist approach, such as counting plugs, could never could have envisioned. Broadband grows as an industry as people's homes become more networked, not by restricting the size and complexity of networks in the homes it serves. To think otherwise is near-sighted and ultimately counter productive for the industry. It is not the monitoring and charging for the number of IP aware devices that will grow this industry, it is encouraging people to make consumption of bandwidth an integral part of their lives and then charging for the bandwidth consumed that is ultimately in the best interest of the industry. I would be very happy if you charged the parents of the kids down the street who swap bloated MP3 files all night more because they use more of the resources, rather than charging me more because I use less bandwidth, but am integrating broadband access into my lifestyle by proliferating the number of IP aware and broadband dependent appliances in my house.
So the problem here is, ISP's are overscheduling their resources without much regard to technological innovations. Banks have long overspent your money; the government mandates a minimum reserve that banks have to keep in cash as a proportion to the amount of money they have on the books. If everyone were to walk into your bank and demand all their funds at once, the bank would go belly-up, since the majority of your money is in the hands of other people in the form of loans and investments.
Telecommunications companies have always been doing this. Do you live in a college dorm? Get everyone on your floor to pick up the phone at the same time and watch the system go south. They statistically determine the probability of a certain amount of resources being used at any given time, and they build the minimum infrastructure necessary to meet their predictions.
The problem with most ISP's is, they don't hire enough statisticians.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Here's a copy of the email I sent to the author:
:-> )
I happened across your Nov 01 article, and have a few comments:
1) The point not addressed by the article is one of "WHY" your fictional character Bob would be willing to share the broadband connection with his neighbors in the first place. Could it be that the cost is perceived as being too high? Perhaps Bob's neighbors were considering a hookup, but upon learning of the horrors that Bob had to endure when getting connected, decided it'd be easier to share Bob's connection... Maybe Bob is splitting the cost with his neighbors?
2) Rather than looking at purported technical solutions, perhaps something easier and less expensive in the long run would be to simply reduce the cost of the service. Keep those install appointments. TRAIN the installers. Have good people answering the phones. Don't force customers to endure 5-level voice menu trees just to talk to someone about slow or dead service. Will it reduce short-term profits? Undoubtedly yes. But long term - the companies will end up with customers who refer to other customers. They'll also end up with people who essentially 'forget' that the service is there, and just use it - and pay for it, month after month, year after year.
3) I'd suggest not wasting time and effort on a technological arms race. Whatever some scientist can cook up in a lab, a 15-yr old hacker can work around in his bedroom. One only has to look at the DeCSS programs (DVD encryption), or Napster's clones for examples. Likewise, wasting money on investigators to track down 'perpertrators', and then suing them with lawyers is a complete waste. It's bad marketing. Just look at what it's done for the RIAA and MPAA.
4) It's no one's business what I have on my home network. If the cable provider can get in there and peek around 'for remote management purposes' then so can any fool hacker out on the net. The first time my IP-enabled picture frame has some porn on it rather than a picture of the vacation, it's all over. To protect myself from such forseeable mischief, I can virtually guarantee that I'd undertake one of the following:
a) Building a piece of software that simply acts as a firewall to the CAT protocol (maybe a "Cat Door"?
b) Allowing the protocol through, but piping it to a particular responder on my firewall, so the CAT probes think they're getting the information they want, but in reality are getting what I feed them ("Cat Toy" )..
c) Giving up entirely on the entire cable situation and moving to some other high-speed internet access provider.
5) Once you have the CAT protocol, what's the liability factor? Is there going to be some lawyer somewhere that says "Well, you COULD see into this network, you DO monitor for certain things, why didn't you monitor for THIS or THAT forseeable occurance and take this or that preventative action? Now my client is harmed and it's because of your negligence!" One large jury award, plus the amount of research into the CAT protocol, plus implementation, plus lost business, plus.... and you've hit the amount that's apparently being lost now....
I could be totally off base, but those are my thoughts. For what it's worth - I'm a cable subscriber, and I don't share the bandwidth with anyone.... However, because of unexplainable slowness, poor phone support, and nightmarish menu-trees when I do call - I have been keeping an eye out for a different high-speed provider. As soon as one pops up with the right cost/bandwidth ratio - I'm gone.... Which is a shame for the cable providers - because they do have the potential for a great business...
------- End of letter
Now that I think of it, I could write some software to keep the cat confused - La Brea Tar pit for the CAT? Or "Shrodinger's CAT" - what will the box reveal to the CAT today? It's it live or is it dead! buwhahahahahahaha
The whole Cable Openness debate a couple of years ago was bogus, and ISPs and Cable Companies both mishandled it. Until PPPoE, the technically right architecture for a cable modem service was to do routing from the head end on up, which makes the traditional ISP's bundled service (modem access, routing packets to Rest Of Internet, and mail/web support) much less competitive, because it's Already Too Open - the cableco will route your packets anywhere you want them to go, without the ISP's bottleneck, and that leaves them competing with free email and web services (including the cableco's portals), so their only value adds are personalized service quality and avoiding advertising banners. The other two openness issues are wholesale pricing / billing, and the afore-mentioned service restrictions. PPPoE strikes me as an ugly kluge that's mainly designed to make it easier to shut off accounts for non-payment, charge extra for some services, and force traffic into bottlenecks like some ISPs, and it's a bad idea as are most of the different NAT options cablecos play with.
What the cablecos should have done is realize that they desperately need customers and use two ways to get them:
I've found the whole "Stop the Nasty Thieving Bandwidth-Sharers" publicity campaign to be in bad taste and a tremendous display of lack of imagination - not only do the cablecos have to cope with the reality of cheap radio and NAT hardware and NAT and routing software, but they Still desperately need ways to bring in many more customers, and should figure out how to use this technical opportunity to get them. Of course, cluelessness isn't a new problem for these folks :-) See: Use a Cable Modem, Go To Jail and the Slashdot Ensuing Discussion.
Lots of Disclaimers - I'm posting this as Anonymous Coward, because I do work in this industry and my opinions are Extremely Not My Employer's, especially the bit about Napster which I just didn't say at all, and you didn't read it here. But hey, I've been ranting like this for a while, and I'm not mentioning their names, because it's strictly my own opinions, not theirs, and besides, as a stockholder of several of these companies I'd appreciate it if everybody in the computer and communications industries could start to get some clues again. We need to start doing synergy, not fighting each other, so we can make some money. And there are several other rants I left out of this one, like how they've dropped the ball on totally transforming the voice telephony industry :-)
Bill The Anonymous Coward
Its not abotu charging bandwith. They want to get more money every way they can. They first make people with more than one pc sharing one pipe look like a bad guy, then they will make each pc using that bandwith a bad guy. It wont work the other way arround because it becomes more obvious what they are doing to even non techies.
What ever happened to the good old isp that gave you shell accounds and diskpace. Or even competition. All the small people have been bought out by horrible big companies that look for every way to force someone in being a customer, and exploit them for every penny they can.
So, bottem line is, they don't care abotu a better way, they just want to find every way to get more money from us w/o providing more.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
my letter to the author of the article
m l)
.....not one damn bit! I am paying for a certain amount of speed and bandwidth, not for an IP#! even if I have two machines running behind the router, I am going to get throttled by the network itself to the speed that I am paying for.
Bcc'd to: rbrown@cahners.com, akerven@cahners.com, jbaumgartner@cahners.com, wdhayes@cahners.com, mlafferty@cahners.com, Ellis299@aol.com
(Mr. Ellis, want to know why you've just experienced a surge in your server stats? take a look here ---> http://slashdot.org/articles/01/11/27/2036244.sht
Mr. Ellis, how should I put this? ok. bluntly, you don't have a clue as to what you are talking about. your article only shows one bright spot where you actually make sense. the rest of it is just sheer stupidity.
let me address your one bright spot. when you talk about the neighbors stealing free network connectivity from Bob, yes, that is a problem and a real concern. from there your article reverts to sheer stupidity. but let's address the issue a little closer. what the hell is a dumbass like Bob doing running a wireless network in his house anyway? hell, if Bob has half a clue, he should have it encrypted, which you did NOT mention at all in your article! I don't run wireless because of the fact that encryption HAS been broken and I can't control radio waves. However, I can control the cat5 cable running to my hub.
now, let's address the other side of the coin. what business is it of the cable company whether or not I run more than 1 IP# behind my router?
a third issue. you say NAT is a problem? what kind of degree do you have? Accounting? cause you sure missed the boat on this one! hell, NAT is good for preventing people from hacking into my network (especially if I am running a server). don't even bring up "The cable company doesn't let you run servers on their system". BULLSHIT! I'm doing it right now because my contract with them specifically allows me to do so since it is Roadrunner Business service. something that the cable company does a pisspoor job of preventing on their end.
Stolen goods? what stolen goods? are you trying to say that because I have multiple machines attached running thru NAT the cable company is losing money? BULLSHIT! look back up where I mentioned bandwidth being throttled. they are giving me exactly what I am paying for. the only place theft comes in is the neighbors surfing on Bob's connection. and that's theft from Bob, not the cable company. why? because the cable company STILL delivers the same amount of bandwidth to Bob, it's just that the neighbors are stealing it from Bob. and what if I happen to have an IP-enabled refrigerator and stove in the house, along with a few other devices? will that count against the total number of ip addresses allowed by the cable company?
your quote "With NAT-based hubs, cable providers wonâ(TM)t be able to see into all connected devicesâ"making remote troubleshooting difficult." sorry, more bullshit from you. what business does the cable company have of looking past their cable modem? absolutely none. they don't troubleshoot past their modem and refuse to do so by saying, "It's working up to the modem so the problem must be in yourcomputer." you may argue "But it's in every contract!". so, does that mean if I write on a piece of paper "Cindy Crawford is required to suck my dick if she reads this.", does that mean I can sue her in court if she doesn't do it? no, because she didn't sign it. but then again, cable companies change their terms of service without written notice all the time. is that illegal if you follow the same chain of logic that I used with Cindy Crawford giving me a blowjob?
To finish all this off, you may say "But I was only talking about Wireless networking the whole time". Again, please stop shovelling the bullshit. You went just as deep into NAT and theft of services as you did about Wireless. hell, it wasn't even a balanced article. how much did the cable companies pay you to write this article? how hard did they suck your dick to twist the plot? did they send someone who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch? was it Cindy Crawford? If this is the kind of writing that your magazine supports, I can guarantee I'll never subscribe to it.
Your 'journalism' created quite a stir on slashdot.org. well over 600 responses (mostly negative). don't even think of bragging "yeah, our article was so popular, we were widely quoted on slashdot!b
it's pretty simple, if they don't want people to use what are using, make it a rule and don't lie about it.
First, lets be honest with ourselves. Bandwidth is not the issue. I've seen whole networks that consume less bandwidth than one or two "warez d00dz". Yet the cable company doesn't complain about them. In fact they'd love to sell cable to whatever "warez d00dz" they can find. If bandwidth really were the issue, metering it would be a simple matter.
So what is the issue? My guess is that it has to do with this fact: Everytime I share my internet connection there's one less customer for the cable modem service. Does the cable company have the right to restrict what I do with the "bandwidth" they sell me? Do I have the right to abuse this "service" that they are offering by sharing it?
Personally I think the idea of a "controlled service" is absurd, it just never works in the real world, at least not by itself. This is because it's very easy to put a clause in a license agreement, but much more difficult to get Jane Consumer to follow it. Perhaps because she didn't read it. Perhaps because she's a good rationalizer. Or perhaps she's a lawyer and didn't recall any notarized signatures when she bought the service.
$5 per IP address indeed!
I'll state this up front. I am not a networking expert, network programmer, or even a guest on The Battle of the Network Stars. *
What I am, tho, is someone who has been on this scene since '81. I remember the advent of fiber optic lines, and the promise of immense bandwidth Some Day, maybe in ten years...
In the mid Eighties, the talk was of laying the mighty fiber trucklines through major cities. I remember the day that downtown Chicago got it's first, GASP, fiber line down the middle of State Street (I think).
Speculation was rife about fiber to the house. Of course, the holdup was that it would cost roughly 500 -- that's five hundred -- dollars per household in '86 dollars to fiber the country up. No one wanted to shoulder that expense. No company wanted to do it -- the profit model couldn't be made to show it working as a business proposition.
I remember debate about letting it become a governemnt service, like water, or a regulated utility. Let taxpayer cash fund the structure of the net; the benefit would be laser beams for all, forever and ever, amen.
Well, the '80's marked the ascendency of the capitalist as a god, and business was our new religion. Public anything was communism, anti-profit, and besides, private biz could do it cheaper, faster, and without the bureaucracy.
We went ahead. Modems reached dizzying speeds of 28.8k, 56k... and the businesses who would pay the premium got T1/T3 lines. No fiber ever reached the citizen, except for a few private projects.
Curiously, as hardware became commodity priced, switches, routers, and their humongous bigger brothers became a cash cow for the companies that made them. Shakeouts occured, companies merged, profits stayed pretty high. Small ISPs couldn't compete with ever-bigger competitors, and died.
Here we are. 2001. And we still are using modems over 1890 Bell wire. And the phone bills still keep climbing, tho why is a mystery...
Here's the bad math. If we had fiber, say, 50 million homes and apartment complexes in the late '80's at guvmint expense, the total would have been:
$ 500.00 US * 50,000,000
= 25,000,000,000 bucks.
Let's adjust it a bit by assuming:
1. That even tho the per home cost of equipment should have dropped with that scale of manufacturing, the cost would have stayed about the same due to the enormous physical work necessary to lay glass pipes over entire cities and burbs.
2. That inflation would make it, say for the fun of it, about $50,000,000,000 US in today's dollars.
3. The project would have taken, say, fifteen years.
Okay then. Per annum, 3 1/3 billion a year to fiber every one of fifty million homes. Hell, there weren't even that many PC's yet, so I'm overshooting.
For 3.33 bil a year, we could have replaced the phone system with a packet-switched digital model. Had video phones. Cable TV with thousands of channels. Video cameras on neighborhood networks, so that everyone could see what was going on around town. Cheap ways for bizes to connect with each other.
The upkeep cost of the system would be in the billions every year, not to mention the cost of fibering new customers all the time. Obsolesence would be a major pain, but we'd get by by standardizing on newer equipment using old standards, and do Good Enough overall.
Okay, so by today, we would all be connected by laser, running at rather interesting speeds. The equipment would become obsolete, but mostly at the neighborhood switch level and higher -- the customer setup would become commodity priced pretty quickly.
What do we have instead?
Okay, let's just say we have, um ten million cable modem subscribers now. Each pays $50 US a month.
That's 500,000,000 mil a month. For 128, 256, whatever, bandwidth.
That multiplied by 12 is $6,000,000,000 - six billion a year we shell out.
And under that biz model, there is no profit incentive, ever, to fiber our homes.
Think about it. Twiddle the numbers around. Don't forget businesses pay far higher prices for their connectivity as well. I left out the modem users and what THEY pay to the phone companies and ISPs.
How much has the free market cost us, and what have we gotten for it?
Shangri La: we had spent 3 billion or maybe more a year, in today's bucks, over a long period of time, to fiber everyone. Yay us.
Too expensive? What about all that Dark Fiber laid down in the last few years? Why innanameofGawd is everything so expensive when it wasn't all that hard to drop that fiber?
Reality: the mega-companies that are buying up and/or creating bandwidth are never going to fiber us, not at prices we can afford. And they also are becoming the same companies that additionally own the entertainment giants, so they want to monitor our net usage to make sure we don't steal their "property". They don't want us sharing bandwidth, or using too much bandwidth, because their profit models would be ruined.
That's business? A small group of rather wealthy companies get it all their own way, and we gave up fiber for this? 'Cause biz was better and cheaper?
I've watched the Great Experiment of the dereg of the telcos (now remerging), of the degreg of media, and I see that we are getting absolutely robbed, of not only our cash, but what the future should have been.
Hell, not the future, the PRESENT.
* Battle of the Network Stars was a really, really bad show in the '70's. Forget I mentioned it.
Third party as defined in a dictionary refers to somebody that is not in the principle group. Refer to what I was talking about in setting up a network. This is not sharing via the @home network. You are doing things on behalf of another computer, not sharing with another computer. Even if you don't agree, it doesn't matter. Your neighbor is physically connected to your network. The cable modem is connected to your computer. That ocmputer is connected to the network. The network is your household, which is the principle group. Your neighbor is not a third party, because he is part of your network domain. You are "sharing" within your own domain. I repeat, YOUR OWN domain. In addition you are not even "sharing" your internet connection, because your server is NOT acting as a bridge. The nodes in your network DO NOT HAVE access to the outside world. They communicate to the gateway (your server), who connects on their behalf. That's why I said look at the network packets. Should this go to court, it would be easy to prove you are not sharing, because sharing implies shared access, but according to the ip header, the packets originated only from the NAT Server. What happens is you have a socket open on the Server talking to the outside, and another socket talking to the inside. Everything on the inside is OUTSIDE THE SCOPE of the outside network. AT&T has as much right to tell you what your private network can connect to, as they do saying that you cannot hold hands with your wife.
The last thing you want to happen is have cable networks (or DSL) start charging per megabyte. THat will be a sad, sad day when that happens. And if people continue to abuse the system then it will.
What the industry wants is not to prevent multiple customers on one wire; that's an excuse. What they want is extra revenue for the kid's PC, the entertainment system, the game consoles, and such.
That proves nothing. That is regulated by the FCC, and computer networks ARE NOT REGULATED BY THE FCC.
Anyways, nothing in there is relevent. You are running an RJ-45 cable to your neighbor. Your neighbor is not connecting to the cable system and "receiving" jack. He is receiving IP traffic from your computer. The IP packets in question are not being offered by your cable system. It is being offered by your server. When your neighbor wishes to view internet content, an IP packet is sent to your server. Your server makes the request on behalf of your neighbor. Your server informs your neighbor what the result was.
God, just when 'big greedy companies' gets to be a cliche, it's drug back into the realm of truth...
My employer (who happens to be a cable carrier, but not the local one) pays for @work, which is allegedly the "business" version of @home. It's *supposed* to come with higher bandwidth (upstream & downstream) along with a modified AUP that allows for VPN, web servers, inbound FTP, etc. All very nice.
Except that where I'm at, the local cable carrier can't/won't provision @work with any substantive difference from @home, meaning that I get the same bandwidth as a "normal" user, even though my employer pays $100/month for the access, plus a per-gb charge of some amount.
Topping it off, the local carrier's installers (including their audit department) cannot manage to bring cable modem access into my home w/o also brining an analog CATV signal for basic cable (and HBO, for some reason), so I get free cable TV that I don't want just for having a cable modem. Then, periodically, they send out their auditors, who find my line unblocked, and turn off both the CATV and the modem feed, because they can't find me in the @home database (because, natch, I'm an @work customer...) I even had one auditor threaten me with prosecution for "theft of cable services", despite the fact that I could show him originals of the work orders for the installation of my cable modem (signed by the installer.)
If it wasn't free, I'd be using DSL. No one who is a cable customer should be sent to hell, they've already been through it.
Two things will prevent any spread of CAT whatsoever:
But then perhaps, if it does spread anyhow, it could only contribute to the Linux installed base (LRP, etc.).
I've worked for two cable companies, installing cable modems and offering instruction in customers' homes. Both companies like to charge for additional TV outlets, and both mind when you are found to have splitters that you shouldn't have.
Both charge for additional IP adresses also, but don't seem to mind when you are running some type of gateway configuration. The one I'm currently with even has instructions on their support web site for customers that want to hook up two computers, offering various methods, such as the standard "get a $50 hub and subscribe to another IP" method. Another method they give is to install a 2nd ethernet card in the main computer, connect via crossover to the other, and run Wingate or Sygate, or have Win98se or higher using Internet Connection Sharing. We don't get commissions for selling IP adresses, because we don't really want to be involved with people's home networks. It's almost as though these additional IPs are supported grudgingly. Too much tech support is needed when these networks (mostly windoze driven) fail to work properly, and if we set it up for them, they expect us to be responsible for it. So we don't do that. If they mention that they want to hook up two computers I can give them advice on how to do it (or make a deal to come back later and do it on my own time) but the company does not do any more than give advice. Neither do I, because I don't want the hassle of them calling me all the time to find out why it isn't working. Remember, most of these people are running Windows.
Our involvement with them is to get them on the Internet, period. We'd rather focus on making sure the connection to their home is good and solid, that their cable modem is functioning properly, and that their email and news is being delivered. Too many man-hours are lost if we are constantly servicing and policing networks. If I'm hooking up a university student in a dorm for example, and notice Cat-5 everywhere, running through walls to adjacent rooms, what am I supposed to say? The truth is easy enough, they obviously know what they're doing so I let them know the cost if they want to get the extra IPs, and mention the drawbacks of the free methods. Online games for example, can have problems with you hosting from such a configuration. Some apps wont run properly when used concurrently on different machines that are all using one real IP.
None of that should be my problem. It *is* theft of service, yes. But it is good customer service to allow it and hope that they are not getting too carried away with it. We have competition from DSL here (which really isn't serious competition but it's there) and have to make sure they like us better. The first company I worked for charged for bandwidth past a certain amount, and most people didn't like that, but put up with it. Where I am now we don't have that, and many customers have expressed appreciation for that fact, so it's obvious we won't be charging for bandwidth any time soon. As long as we keep the network going fast enough it shouldn't matter.
As for 802.11b, that's a bit scary since it increases the amount one could share regardless of whether in a dorm, apartment, or house. I think we should probably care about this issue, it potentially impacts my job directly. As for wired "free" networks, they are more limiting in the amount of sharing that can go on and are probably not worth worrying about. So basically, we as a whole have not been thinking about it, as far as I know.
Please cc replies to feanturi23@hotmail.com
I don't understand how this works - for one thing last I saw you cannot forward a mac address. There's not a router in the world that can do this. Of course those linksys "routers" are pretty open gateways to peoples networks - its still a lot of guess work - for instance you might be able to probe far enough and find machines beyond the cable network, but how do you prove they are accessing the internet?
How else do they detect nat routers? I'm running my little SS10 under kernel 2.4.14 - it was easier to detect 2.2.x doing masq stuff, but how you detect 2.4.x is beyond me.
Also - and this is the big point I think was missed - I had a friend that broken down and bought an extra IP - the extra IP was on a different subnet - as far as I could tell to route back to the machine sitting next to it - it had to go out over the cable router - out to the gateway and back to the machine - just to play network games against each other. As I recall it had about a 50 ms ping... So in some ways your wasting even more bandwidth the way these people allocate ip's.
I resent the idea that I have to pay extra money because I have more than one computer in my house. I'm only using one IP (thanks to my Linux box), so the cable company can piss off. It'd be just as cheap for me to have 2 cable modem lines if I had to pay $5 extra per month per computer. I'm not about to make everyone in my home stand in line either.
These 'CAT' people seem to forget something, I can put a NAT box behind the 'CAT' device, and lie to them all day long. When they change their software, I change the kernel. Since the kernel soure is freely available, and I can at least marginally read C code, they're wasting their time and money. It would be better spent improving service and fixing all the stupid layers of bureaucracy in the company and training their incompetent service people.
There's at least one good thing about NAT that these people don't seem to get. I have a friend who uses NetZero dialup because his total 'net usage is simply not enough to justify high-speed service. If he could split the cost of a cable or DSL line with the people in his apartment building (who are either dialup or nothing at all), then the cable company would be making something, instead of nothing. I know many people who use dialup just because they can't justify spend 2-3x as much for something they don't use often. I say it's better for the cable company to get some money than none at all.
As far as the $30M in lost revenue, it's mostly bogus. The only way that figure is right is if the author is correct in assuming that I am an evil thief because I don't use a routable IP address for each device on my network. I think the revenues would outstrip the losses if a lot of people scrapped their dialup in favor of sharing a link with their neighbor.
Another reason I don't want to give up my NAT is privacy/security. I don't have to worry (much) about securing my desktops because no incoming connections can do them any harm. Even if they install a trojan (and I promptly give them the 3rd degree and a nice chewing out) it becomes relatively harmless because the box is not remotely accessible (hopefully). Well, until someone releases a trojan server that opens connections to clients that is. Perhaps that discussion is better left elsewhere...
Does anyone else think it strange that the guy writing this article uses AOL??? And how does is an AOL user a "Technology Analyst" anyway? Does that make me a "Plumbing Analyst?"
Some one said a Commercial T1 line capable of 300GB/month is $400 and I'm asking why don't you get many people (10-20) together, lease such a line, set up wlan or whatever access points to the big pipe and skip with the DSL providers altogether...? You have the pipe, you have the bandwidth, then go ahead and use it. It would require a knowledgeable person to host the end of the pipe though. Why hasn't this been done.. must be because it sounds like communism :-)
You would think more people would figure this sort of thing out...
You two arguing so much over my post. I got one question AVS, are you unemployed? You seem to smart to be a dumbass, and you have enough time to make all these posts. Which leads me to one conclusion.. You must be an out of work tech worker :) Hey do like I did, your broadband is essential to you as a geek, become a neighborhood ISP and get your own DSL paid for. I just walk up the street and collect on the first of every month W00t!
If you're not allowed to run a server, and get a worm, the company can be reasonably suspicious that the open port is a backdoor, and then contact you.
If you let people run servers, they'll get hacked since they don't know what the heck they are doing. Then you'll have a bunch of compromised machines in your network that could be activated in a DDOS attack, or used to start worm attacks, or whatever.
Thus, restricting servers is pretty much a good thing. If you want to run a server for a few friends, make firewall rules that let them access and no-one else. This is reasonable secure if your friends are truly your friends, and will go undetected by the cable nazis.
Stop the brainwash
I have seen this done. If you use a lot of bandwitdh they put a lower cap on your modem. In the end the bandwidtd get so low you can only use a very limited amount per month from them.
It is all covered in the fair use/do not disrupt our network clause they have. and since they are a big company you can not do very much. The real problem is that they do not have bought enough internet bandtwidth, or the internal routers are configured very bad.
Most of the terms of service agreements prohibit reselling the service. "Sharing" with a Neighbor could be considered reselling even if some currency other than money is used to pay for it...
BTW, it they wanted to find people hooking up wireless hubs, all they would have to do is install a wireless node in their repair trucks that tried to connect to any present wireless node and ping a known machine that was only mapped within their network.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
...that anything beyond the amount of bandwidth used doesn't affect their costs and is therefore none of their business.
Or you could say that, by extending free wireless service to the rest of your neighborhood, you're unfairly competing with your provider by taking potential customers away from them (and reducing the return they can get on their large capital investment - wiring up a neighborhood probably has a fixed cost).
Compromise? For the moment, offer a choice of two contracts at different prices - a per-bandwidth rate and a per-device rate.
In the long run, though, as infrastructure gets cheaper and cheaper through economies of scale and it therefore gets easier and easier for cable investors to get a good return, it'll be good public policy to steer bandwidth in the direction of being a commodity instead of being controlled by cartels.
I know it's late in the article's life, but I've already browsed at -1 to see if anyone had any idea of what CAT is and how it will work.
So far, no good.
Any thoughts on how CAT will work and how it will effectively count up computers? How will it's usage preclude the usage of NAT?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Amen.
It really seems as though technology is outpacing the market right now, and companies are actually holding back products and services, in order to squeeze every last exhorbitant drop of cash out of their entrenched business model (T1's come to mind). I have personally seen 2 ISPs brought to thir knees becasue the Telco was slow in response to ADSL Trouble Tickets. Those ISPs no longer exist.
Although I can understand that after investing a great deal of money into infrastructure, only to see it obsoleted before you break even would really suck. Still,that's no excuse for Gov't to use the law to support a company's bad planning or industry meltdown. Or to allow shit like DeCSS and the RIAA to go on.
I just subscribed to digital cable service in my area. It is only a matter of $5-10 difference between their digital package, and getting their regular cable service+cable internet.
Reg cable = ~60 channels of crap.
Cable internet = 2 IP's and ~50K upstream cap, friggin fast downstream.
Digital Cable = ~60 channels of crap, Cable Internet, 5 movie channels, music channels ( like a radio thru your TV), and access to pay-per-view, and rent cable box @ $10/month, or buy box @ $200.
So for almost the same price as two seperate packages, I get some movies and music and the access to pay flicks. Picture quality is not better or anything though.
The piss-off here is that all this time they have been pushing all these new channels only available on Digicable ( National Geographic, Discovery Civilizations, etc) but now I find out that those channels are for trial purposes only.
AHA. I see now. I just coughed up $200 bones for a $15 dollar blackbox, to get the virtually the same service for the same price. And I get this neato box. Whoopdedoo.
Sounds like I'm helping to offset their infrasrtucture costs with this new technology, without any real benefits, other than they get to entice me to pay even more per month to watch some decent channels. They should be providing an option to watch only TLC, Discovery etc, cause I sure don't watch Ally McBeal.
Cable TV is a poor parallel --- no fraction of what I pay my ISP actually goes to fund content. Electricity or water is a better comparison, and I can't imagine the power company referring to my electric blanket as stealing.
The rules from my provider in the UK are these; They don't support networks, however you are free to connect one up. If you call support you'd better have the cable-modem connected directly to a windows pc. You may run servers that only allow 10 connections. You may not run an open-relay mailserver. You may not run an anonymous ftp box. I get 128K up and 512K down. No usage limit.
Leslie,
You are advocating something that is completely appalling from a
consumer's standpoint. Yes, NAT does allow some pirates to share with
others outside their household, it also allows legal subscribers to set
up firewalls so their computers are not constantly bombarded by all the
crackers who tirelessly assail the tempting always-on cable modem
users. Were it not for NAT, I would be a sitting duck to every 14 year
old script kiddie on the block.
Further, I see in your argument the same tired story parroted by the
likes of the MPAA in their stand against Napster and similar
file-sharing technologies: that anything offering more choices to the
consumer is surely bad for big business and the solution is to limit
choice to the consumer. You state: "At the very least, cable MSOs
involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by
them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices." I cannot
help but assume that the "maximum number of connected devices" which the
MSOs would prefer the consumer to have is one. And probably one that
would be required to push advertisements in our faces at regular
intervals.
It amuses me to picture the reactions of cable execs pondering the
drawing of Carol, Ted, and Alice, the "Non-Subscribers" (aka potential
revenue streams) who are sharing Bob's bandwidth, to think of the
self-righteous rage welling up within them as they call an emergency
meeting with their engineering staff directing them to come up with a
way to stop this profit-stealing piracy. It amuses me that they are so
hopelessly out of touch with the world, that the Internet to them is
nothing if it can't be commoditized at $4.95 a month.
Have you sold your soul, Leslie, is it all about the money?
Dictionaries are for loosers.
Not only do they not want you sharing bandwidth with your neighbors, they don't want you sharing it with yourself! I know of many people who have >1 computer, as a matter of convenience.
You're right about "changing the rules". In my area, they have already degraded the service by capping the uplink at 128K. I still have a static IP, but I know of people nearby who got converted to DHCP. Add in the chronic packet loss, piss-poor e-mail reliability and news retention, along with downlink speeds that are nowhere near what they advertise, and you end up with some disgruntled customers who are not about to tolerate cable company meddling with our internal networks.
This service was originally sold as flat rate, unlimited access, 2.5MB (sort of) up and down, with a single static IP. It was a good deal. As time goes by, it costs more and more while it delivers less and less.
What's the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one.
The author is assuming that, if the users weren't "stealing" (rhetoric 101: apply perjorative terms to things you don't like) bandwidth, they would be buying it for whatever the seller cares to charge. Doesn't work that way. There are many things that I get free (the vast majority of Webpages I look at, for instance) that I wouldn't be willing to pay anything at all for.
And certainly, no one had fully imagined that the resources shared by a single, wirelessly-networked residence would also be shared among other devices, at other residences, within 300 feet.
This is simply a failure of market research. The cable providers assumed that the "typical" user would look at graphics-heavy news sites (cnn.com or suchlike) and send a bit of e-mail, and that would be it. When the "typical" household has Mom watching movie trailers, Dad looking at pr0n, and the kids swapping MP3s, it's no wonder that the pipe gets jammed. Instead of saying "Oops!" and figuring out how to deal with it, they want to go back and cram the usage pattern into their marketing model.
Basically, the whole thing is a marketing error, compounded by abysmal ignorance of things Internet on the part of the cable providers. There are any number of technical fixes that don't involve dealing with anything behind the firewall. Unfortunately, this is "too much like work" for the cable providers.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I'm not unemployed, fortunately. But I am home sick :)
Let's say I have unlimited phone service. I pay the phone company $x/month, regardless of how many phones I have hooked up. If I hook up acordless phone and give my neighbor the handset, nobody is "stealing" anything. I paid the phone company for the ability to make & recieve an unlimited number of phone calls; it makes no difference if I'm the only person who uses the phone or if a thousand of my friends make use it. Similarly, if I have electrical service and run an extension cord over to my neighbor's house, nobody is "stealing" from the electric company, because they are still getting paid for every kilowatt-hour that gets used.
An ISP has no more business telling me how I can use my connection than the phone company has telling me who I can call, or the electric company has telling me what appliances I can use.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Some old LanCity POS (from what I understand, known as the "footwarmer" because the case is a huge curved heatsink) I lease from my cable co (I really should go out and buy one - but I may be moving in a few months, so I don't know what kind of service I will have/be able to get when I move).
Anyhow, I started looking into DOCSIS and capping a bit after posting - found the DOCSIS specs from cablemodems.com (IIRC), plus a couple of RFCs - most of it details protocols, etc.
I tend to wonder if there is a way to "spoof" the system, given appropriate hardware (which would all have to be custom built - talk about a major RF project). It seems like DOCSIS, even 1.0 - had provisions so that when the CM is plugged in and turned on, it gets its settings from the head-end, sets them, then compares the settings with the head-end a second time, as a verification step, then allows communication to take place - the spoof box would have to somehow do all of this, plus do it occasionally (because the verify process happens now and then). I also think it might not work, plus it might be detectable from the head end or elsewhere. In the end, it would probably take too much effort for not enough gain.
Interesting to think about, though...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Heh. I guess @Home and the cable companies never did get their shit together regarding this, though it has been a known problem for years. The previously-linked story was also discussed here on /.
~Philly
so, if I have the option of bandwidth vs. devices for my rate, what's to stop me from choosing "device" and then routing [very large number] of devices through it? Particularly if I'm dyn-dns'ing my neigbors.... (I don't, but that's another issue)
What is your Slash Rating?
Even if someone has a cable modem that uses CAT, what would prevent them from setting up a Linux box with 2 network cards, and have it do NAT? The Linux box would be the only computer directly connected to the modem. The only way I can think that the cable co would be able to effectively determine how many computers were on a LAN would be to force uses to use authentication software, which would probably be Windows only.
And if you are worried that you might exceed your volume accidentally, ISPs might send you IM notification when you approach your limit, as well as give you real-time access to your accounting info.