VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service

wayn3 writes "ComputerWorld reports here that two of the major cable companies have language in their terms of service that VPN clients are forbidden for "residential" class, forcing clients on their "business" offering which is at twice or more times the cost of residential service. Has any been bit by this, and do those companies consider SSH a VPN client? This would stop me from telecommuting since my company would not be able to afford the business service."

Comments

Ssshhhh, don't tell Adelphia!

[dpilot]

Their TOS are terrible, and getting worse every rev. They have always had a 'no servers for the use of others' policy, and I've always run sshd because it's a server for my own use. On the last rev they disallowed 'any servers at all', which I didn't take seriously because IRC is broken without ident. Besides, technically ICMP could be considered both client and server, and the whole freakin' net is broken without it. Finally, my sshd is for my use only, and is configured and firewalled that way.

Also on the last TOS update they disallowed sucking feeds on their mostly-broken newsservers. They really don't know what they're doing, because in the grand scheme of things, they're just pushing those people to a sucking feed on an external newsserver, and eating their head-end bandwidth. Besides, an off-hours sucking feed would probably be more benign, and I'd be happy to adjust my cron setup to cooperate.

AFAIK they have no anti-VPN wording in their TOS, but IMHO that's only because they aren't clued in to its existence to forbid it.

IMHO, Adelphia wants to be in the 'TV for your computer' business.