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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.
(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.
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 $$$s because I own three computers, a net-connected TiVo, and an internet enabled toaster or stoplight? Aren't they still just providing me a single connection and some bandwidth? What right do they have to charge for my toaster? Do they have a contract with *me*, or with *my device*? They seem to think they are providing my computer with a service; I happen to believe my computer can't sign a contract, so the service is provided to me, and this price gouging shouldn't be allowed.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
NAT is good for what it does. I don't recommend forcing another protocol - that will be circumvented anyway.
I would prefer a bandwith/$$ model if they are going to start nickel and diming us. Kinda like cell phones.
You get so many Megs or Gigs for $X. After that you get a message sent to either your phone or email saying that you have used up your data "minutes". You can then a)explicitly enable your connection again at $X/meg, or b) wait until next month.
Will it stop "unauthorized use" - no. Will it make it more expensive? yes. Which in turn means the cable company gets compensated and Ted has to charge his neighbors to make up the difference.
Best all around solution? No. But it works for cell phones, and would be reasonable compromise for most parties involved.
Often, the cable modem provider's objection is *not* to the bandwidth, but merely to running any kind of server.
10 GB/month of Napster/whatever: OK
1 MB/month of web server: not OK
In Chicago, we got so sick of sucky internet providers that we banded together and created a Coop, where you pay for only the pipe, and you get what you pay for.
www.ISPFH.org
The drawbacks?
It ain't cheap.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
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
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?