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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.
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with his apartment complex, then that ends up cost ME more in the long run (or alternately, and worse, the service is withdrawn entirely because it isn't economically viable).
(Well, okay, the real argument is probably that the providers see a way to make more money but....)
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
This article is a misleading justification of price gouging. "The good news is, the dishonest people who know how to do it are already doing it..."; clearly anyone with two computers must be a dishonest thief.
They discuss sharing amongst neighbors, but what they are really upset about is not being able to charge for every device I own or sharing amongst roommates. Nowhere is the fact that even toasters are getting IP addresses mentioned, and none of the technology they are looking forward to will allow the provider to differentiate between my toaster and my neighbor's computer.
So the interesting question to me is, why does my service provider deserve more $$$s because I own three computers, a net-connected TiVo, and an internet enabled toaster or stoplight? Aren't they still just providing me a single connection and some bandwidth? What right do they have to charge for my toaster? Do they have a contract with *me*, or with *my device*? They seem to think they are providing my computer with a service; I happen to believe my computer can't sign a contract, so the service is provided to me, and this price gouging shouldn't be allowed.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
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.
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?"
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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
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/
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
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.