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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."
Girard said cable business-class service "is not any better than residential, yet they charge you more."
Imagine your phone company doubling your bill because they analysed your calls and decided you made a call to the office!!
I buy bandwidth. What I do with the bandwidth is nobody's business (obvious exceptions included..)
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Granted for business purposes I can kinda see the reason (tho dun get me wrong I use VPN-1 for work a lot..) but what about the techie's who use vpn-1 at home.. ie.. I vpn into my friends network at his house all the time, sometimes to remote admin to the gaming server, when it decides to crash, or play 'round with some other things in the network.. this definatly is *NOT* business related.. and a lot of the reason he has it setup is for learning (certifications)..
Granted not a lot of people use vpn as personal, but what about the people that do? sometimes there are non-business related things u can use vpn for.. should they be penalized too?
~slak
Let me get this straight, the company pays you enough that you can in turn pay $X for the service but they "can't afford" to additionally pay $X themselves (to make up the difference to the $2X price of business-class)? BS. Either you are exaggerating or the company is lying to you--they just don't want to pay for it.
I work for a large (3000+ people) company in the Philadelphia region. The company currently supports telecommuting with broadband through VPN. Currently, they pay $39.95 per month for connectivity, plus $30 per month for outsourced broadband routers/firewalls. (The latter part I think is stupid, but I digress.) So for each person telecommuting, they pay roughly $70 per month
Now, increase that highspeed access from $39.95 to $95.00, and they would have to pay roughly $125 per month per person. If only 300 out of the 3000 people here telecommute, that's a cost of $37,500 a month, or $450,000 a year just for broadband users. At the previous price, it would be roughly $252,000 per year. Almost 200k more. That's a lot of money to just "find" in your budget. So what happens? Comcast loses money because my company suspends all high-speed telecommuting. So now instead of getting their extra 200k a year, they get nothing, and the people who benefited from telecommuting no longer can.
You know, if Comcast wanted all these people/companies to shell out $50 more per month, the LEAST they could do is remove that 128kbps upstream cap they enforce for business accounts. Its really annoying to transfer large files to work or VPN to a server when you can't send out over 15K/sec, peak.
The problem here is that most people who use VPNs to connect to their workplace aren't telecommuters, but people who need a file or to check mail or something simple on an infrequent basis. Relatively few people truly telecommute (i.e. work from home most or all of the time). This more expensive business use, as well as actually running a business (servers, whatever) should cost more. But it seems unfair for someone to have to shell out the extra dough so they can check their mail from home.
Obviously there are secure ways besides VPNs to implement this functionality, and eventually I think we'll see a move towards these. The question remains how will the enforce this prohibition? And if it's allowed on business connections, does that mean they'll support it, too?
See, the real issue here isn't "no you can't do that here," but that certain types of users call with certain kinds of questions, and this allows those answering the questions to segregate the questions so the right people can answer them. IP/SEC traffic requires certain very specific protocols and ports to be opened which may not normally be open on a standard ISP network. Most legacy hardware, and much current hardware doesn't support IP/SEC, so it cannot work. Your cable modem/router probably doesn't, unless it's high end or very new.
By prohibiting this activity on their "home" networks, they need not burn cycles explaining why "you can't do that, it just won't work," while really saying "our hardware can't handle it." The latter unfairly casts a negative shadow on an ISP who simply didn't design their network to handle this traffic, and perhaps doesn't see that as being cost effective to do.
So this is another attempt to cover themselves for not providing any sort of support for VPN, including enabling the funcationality on their hardware. It's like their not supporting more than one machine in your house, or not supporting linux on their cable network. It would cost them way more to do it right than it's worth. They aren't doing anything wrong, though they're not doing anyone any favors, either. They aren't likely to tell you to stop, just not to ask for help. IP/SEC may never work on these networks, but other VPN-like items will probably fly under the radar.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
What little chance I had of sympathizing with the "no business use" restrictions of residential service vanished once I realized that residential service is ALL there is.
The places that talk about the restrictions on residential service seem to imply that just by paying more, one can sign up for a "business class" service that is essentially the same as residential service but without those restrictions.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. Business class service (except briefly for some of the areas served by Cox cable) over cable lines does not exist. It is a strawman that cable ISPs use to pretend that their restrictions on "business" use are somehow rational. This is a re-occuring thread in various @Home newgroups.
Hopefully having an article in ComputerWorld will produce more explicit explanation from cable ISPs about what exactly they mean by business use.
Consider that a common Comcast@Home commercial shows someone auditioning for an acting job halfway across the country through an @Home webcast. If that's not allowed, I smell a bait-and-switch lawsuit.
Second, the network isn't going to give me any more bandwidth than I'm paying for, so it shouldn't matter what I'm doing with the bandwidth that I have.
Now, as far as the extras that a business account provides:
Tech support - don't need it, and they don't support Linux anyway.
Static IP address - the residential service gives me that anyway - and even if it didn't, I would be somewhat inconvenienced, but it's not something I care about.
Web hosting, email hosting, etc... - don't need it, don't want it.
other value added services - don't need them, don't want them, wouldn't use them.
So I have absolutely no use for the business service and I physically cannot use more bandwidth than their network will give me (which is what I'm paying for) so I don't see any reason for them to get all pissy about what kind of packets I'm sending over the bandwidth that I pay for.
Besides, I use Cox and I seriously doubt that they have the technical knowhow to navigate themselves out of a wet paper bag, much less figure out what applications I'm running on my computer at home.