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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?"
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
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.
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 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 $$$s because I own three computers, a net-connected TiVo, and an internet enabled toaster or stoplight? Aren't they still just providing me a single connection and some bandwidth? What right do they have to charge for my toaster? Do they have a contract with *me*, or with *my device*? They seem to think they are providing my computer with a service; I happen to believe my computer can't sign a contract, so the service is provided to me, and this price gouging shouldn't be allowed.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I'd like a little more concrete numbers there. ANYBODY can pick a number and make a horrific sounding cost analysys out of it. It's a lot like saying 'A CD costs $17, and a DVD costs $19, therefore, all that video and extra features only costs two bucks!'
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
NAT is good for what it does. I don't recommend forcing another protocol - that will be circumvented anyway.
I would prefer a bandwith/$$ 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.
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
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?
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
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
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
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
What about if I ask the neighbor to give me $20 a month to share the bandwidth. Is that wrong?
GPL Deconstructed
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes, but you're talking DSL. You pay for a fixed amount of bandwidth. If you put 253 computer behind your NAT, and pull up the /. home page at the same time, you are still only using 384K of bandwidth (yes, I know you're running Squid, that's beside the point). It will be very slow.
In a cable situation, you're sucking up a lot more bandwidth than they THINK you paid for. You're "granted" a certain portion of neighborhood shared bandwidth. By hooking up 253 PCs you're now exceeding that bandwidth that was "granted" to you. , and they call it stealing. It's poor design on their part, but it's easier to charge people for useless technology than fix their screwup.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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 ?
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
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.
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?"
Bzzzt. Try again.
The entire Internet is "shared bandwidth". If I pay for a pipe, whether it be OC48 or dialup, I'm paying for bandwidth, not a device count. How I use that bandwidth is up to me. The cable companies have the option of throttling customers bandwidth usage (aside from the advertising, there really isn't anything promising X/kbps), but they probably won't because of the resultant bad publicity. From where I sit, this looks like a case of out and out, big company greed.
This also something of a red herring. Remember, cable companies aren't really telcos. They have no institutional concept of things like demarcs, CPE, and CME. As far as they are concerned, it's their network, and they have the right to talk to any device connected to it.
That being said, I'm not terribly worried about this. The bottom line is that walling then off from your home network will still be possible, plus I don't really see the equipment makers buying into this. There are already cable "routers" that not only have programmable MAC addresses, but that automagically adopt the MAC of the first device plugged into the hub side, so it looks like your cable/DSL modem is speaking to a pee-cee. Failing that, a cheap miniboard 486 or pentium with 2 ethernet cards works nicely.
(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
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!
icq won't work properly. dcc on irc won't work properly. people won't be able to host q3 games with a friend. ftp can be funky behind nat.
there are tons of reasons why they shouldn't do it. not to mention the fact that to the external world, everything would look like one big ip address - irc servers would need to change clone rules, URL's could be sniffed and then connected to (example: hotmail authenticates based partially on IP, so if you hit that link and it appeared to be the same ip, you could get in), etc. it's a bad idea. no offense. but it just wouldn't work.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
NAT stands for Network Address Translation
However the Cable Companies, at least by what the article intimates, must think it means Network Aided Thievery!!!!
$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.
Actually it has been written. It's called a Linux box with masquerading/NAT and port forwarding enabled. Or the equivalent in *BSD, or a Netgear or Linksys or other router with the same functionality. The CAT box sees just the gateway, and if it tries to query the gateway for what's behind it it gets back either no answer or "I dunno what protocol you're talking, buddy, so go away.". End of problem.
And if you think I'm trusting cable-company equipment between my computers and the world, you've gotta be kidding.
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...)
I can imagine it now. "Your plan provides 2 "anytime" GBs, and 10 "off-peak" GBs per month. Additional "anytime" GBs will be $5/ea. Peak hours are 3pm to 3am, M-F, and all day Sat and Sun."
Actually... that might be nice. Warez d00ds can d/l there ISOs while I'm asleep, and I'll have enough bandwidth to check my email when I get home at night.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Network Address Translation
See here and elsewhere via google for lots of info.
ipmasquerading is an example of this using in the linux kernel, where packets from one ip address (your neighbor's wirelessly-connected laptop, perhaps) are changed so that they appear to come from a different place (the ip address associated with the cable modem, for example), and reply packets are then forwarded back to the translated source.
read about iptables and netfilter in kernel 2.4.x for the latest...
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that makes me angry as well.
What really makes me wonder is how cable co's would react to multiple neighbors using aggregate bandwidth (I think that's the right word ) - in other words, imagine each neighbor (say, four neighbors next door to each other) getting the cable internet service (let's say the service is 256K up/2M down). Each sits behind a firewall/router/NAT bridge of some sort, and has a network behind that. In addition, each neighbor runs a ethernet cable to the next house over, hub to hub (or better, switch to switch), behind the firewalls. So, you end up with a neighborhood LAN. With the routers set up properly, the neighbors could share a 1M up/8M down connection (max, for one person). Each would still pay for their connection.
What would the legalities of this be? No one is "stealing" anything. How would this be different than if one person got four seperate cable lines ran to his house (paying four seperate bills)? BTW, can someone do this? It would be interesting to ask about, certainly.
This is about greed - plain and simple. I would much rather have very cheap metered bandwidth (use as little or as much as I want, like ISDN or a T1, but much cheaper - maybe with an initial flat rate, then per meg after the limit), the pipe, an IP or two, then nothing else. Quit the fucking DHCP shuffle, and leave me static, and let me run what I want (clients, servers, whatever)...
Can you tell this bothers me?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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!!!
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'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.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
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
They do, if you turn them on. And they wouldn't complain if your neighbors plugged their lights into your house, either.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Should @HOME try to query my home NAT/ipmasq router it won't receive anything -- any incoming non-return packets get dropped to the floor regardless of the destination port.
Honestly I'm not sure how you could easily detect a NAT connection short of 1) breaking into the box or 2) examining every packet to look for return port discrepencies.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
This is like the electric company charging me per light.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." --Unknown
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.
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
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.
Thats not the case here. My modem is capped at 3mb down and 128k up. So I only have so much to use. If I have 300 computers on my network, and they all wanted to use them at the same time, OR If I had one computer, and I wanted to download mp3's from a fast server at full speed. The same amount of bandwidth is being used. It's like everything today, and it sucks - people want 'pay per use' and I apoligize for not putting any thought into how to verbalize this part of what I'm trying to say, because it stews and boils in my head constantly. Everyone wants you to pay for each little thing these days. Pay-Per-View, pay-for play' high school sports, and what about those DVD's you could 'buy' but had to pay to watch it each time you wanted to watch it. Luckily that one never really took off. I don't much like where the world is going right now. I can fully understand the need to make a buck. but where to we draw the line?
Don't Tread on Me
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
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
Good point -- pay $5/month for a signal that, unless you have a $10000 TV, gets rendered onto an NTSC TV screen and still looks like ass.
I'll bet the marketing data (demographics/viewing times) from the more advanced cable boxes pays for a good portion of that $5/month.
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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
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.
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.
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.
My parents got Verizon DSL over a year ago, when it was still Bell Atlantic DSL. For a couple months, it didn't work at all, and there would be a weekly visit from an incompetent 'repairman'. He would fiddle with the settings for hours, and give up. Finally, they sent their senior repairman, who promptly said that the internal DSL modem they had had an over 50% failure rate, and gave them an external DSL modem. This worked for a while, but it would periodically go out for a day at a time. Again, there were almost nightly calls to tech support, who would each blame the problem on a different reason, and make no progress. Finally, my parents were upgraded to "Presidential Level" support, and were sent a new external DSL modem. Things seem to work now, but we'll see...
On the other hand, I got the same DSL months before they did, and I've had hardly any problems.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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/
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
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
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?!?
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.
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
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 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.
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
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?
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
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
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"?
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
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
but they didn't care how many devices I ran behind my Cisco router
Really? Lucky you. Bellsouth kept bitching at us whenever they found out that we hooked multiple computers up to our connection. Of course, they also bitched that we were running a linux machine, but in both cases we just pointed out that there was nothing in our contract prohibiting that.
Dyolf Knip
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.
It's the lazy companies and demanding shareholders etc... Companies are pressured to increase profits and it is a whole lot easier to sqeeze a bit more money out of a current user base than it is to do new and interesting things. Whats the incentive to provide value to the customer in a controled monopoly. I'm sure there is a lot of incentive for them to squeeze you out of every penny you have. So what should really get you is that there is nothing to prevent you from screwing you around because the officials we eect are not passing the laws required to prevent these sort of things from happening and creating competition in the marketplace.
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.
You would think more people would figure this sort of thing out...
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.
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.
If I am utilizing a NAT device (Cable/DSL Router Appliance, Linux Box, etc.) then I still only have one device on their network.
The remaining devices are on my network, whether wired, or wireless...
I am purchasing nothing more than bandwidth from these clowns. I don't use their mail hosts, nor their DNS servers, nor their "Free" 10 Megabytes of Web Hosting space. They are, to me, simply a utility.
The bandwidth is like the water that runs through my faucets, or the electricity that flows from my wall sockets.
I get Xkbps, which is capped by their equipment anyway, and I give them my money monthly.
The infrastructure is there... They paid to install it. Every empty bit-space on the wire erodes their return on investment. What is in short suppy, arguably, is the IP address I utilize from their address space, so if I want an additional IP address, I don't have a problem paying for that (My Cable ISP offers additional IP addresses for $6.95/month).
If we extend your assertion to the Power company, then you should be charged per wall socket used... Or to the water utility: Charged per faucet...
In each of those cases, you are indirectly charged per electrical device, or per running faucet. Power and Water are metered. The Cable companies and DSL providers could (and some day, I believe will) do the same.
What is preferable: Flat-rate medium bandwidth (640kbps down / 320kbps up), or Metered high bandwidth (1.5Mbps+ up and down)?
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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.
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
The AirPort Base Station is basically just Apple support hardware surrounding a Lucent(?) 802.11b PC Card. There is an antenna made by Lucent(?) specifically for this card. All you have to do is get the antenna, and Dremel a hole in your ABS case plastics so the connector can run from the card inside to the antenna outside. Do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find detailed instructions, part numbers, and photos.
~Philly
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.