Cable Companies Saying No to WiFi Sharing

blastedtokyo writes: "According to this story from CNet, Time Warner Cable is going after people who share their wireless connections via NYC Wireless or other public share networks. All we need is a warchalking symbol that conveys 'I'm a lawyer who doesn't have time to figure out how to set up a WEP link.'" This might remind you of a story posted the other day about other ways cable ISPs are trying to lock down their networks.

Comments

AT&T offers wireless options - will they restr

[cetan]

Many cable companies seem to think that trying to restrict their users from wireless solutions is a good idea, but AT&T seems to have the right approach.

http://www.attbroadband.com/homenetworking
redirects to
http://www.computers4sure.com/linksys/store/att_zi p.asp

If you drop in your zip code you will see that AT&T not only doesn't deny you wireless but in fact offers a one-stop-shopping for wireless products from Linksys.

So, while this specific article is about sharing your wifi with people that don't live in your apartment/home/discarded fridge box, I have to wonder if AT&T will even care about such sharing. They're pushing wifi as a solution, so they have to expect this sort of thing to happen...

So it's right to steal resources? Some Solutions..

[RobertAG]

The basic problem here is that some people feel the need to "bring it to the masses" - for whatever reason. I see a couple of solutions:

1. Turn off the service on these thieves.

2. Acknowledge the fact that this is happening and place a cap of some sort on their monthly transfers or bandwidth.

3. Acknowledge the fact that this is happening and charge them for usage accordingly.

4. Acknowledge this is happening and set up a public information infrastructure, where the cost would be shared by businesses, providers AND taxpayers. This is akin to setting up public streetlamps, wastebaskets, water fountains, etc. The public has shown an interest in this type of thing, so it's alternately good business and good public policy - something you don't see too much of.

PERSONALLY - I prefer the fourth option.....

What's the agreement say?

[anthony_dipierro]

Mine says I "may not connect more than 5 computers at a single location" and that I can't "resell the Service or any portion thereof," but it doesn't say anything about giving it away for free (assuming fewer than 5 computers at a time are connected).

Telocity is great. I have nothing bad to say about them.

Re:I agree with them

[warpSpeed]

I own a small ISP, so I fully agree that it's within ISPs rights to limit the connection to only those who purchase it for consumer grade services.

I own a small ISP too, and my clients pay by the sip. They get a "cheap" T1 access, but they have to limit the usage of it, or pay more. It is that simple.

The idea of crazy fast bandwidth for a cheap low monthly rate is good, but ripe for abuse.

Bandwidth costs money, plain and simple. To account for consumption you need to charge by the byte, that way a fair price is paid by all, and there are no free loaders.

Ultimately it is the only fair way of paying for bandwidth consumption.

They can't control

[famazza]

Whatever they say they'll do, they can't have any control. If they say you cannot share your connection how will they be sure that you are not sharing? Even using an regular eth connection with your neighbor, what can do?

Once the data arrived your computer you can pass it anywhere you want, you can send it through your eth connection our wifi, or whatever, you can even throw it back to the internet. The point is that They can't do anything, simply because then can't know what you are doing with all the data arriving in your computer.

What amazes me the most is that the Cable Companies seems to don't know this. Why don't they know it? What is happening? Do they only recruit lawyers? Don't they have technical consulting there? Don't they have a employer with a QI 90+ to tell them that it probably won't work and the best is to consult somebody who knows what s/he's doing?

This shows the quality of the service we are buying, we, nothing more then geeks, know more about their bussiness then themselves.

Shame...

Depends on what it's used for.

[Andy Dodd]

Cable companies don't have the resources to go hunt down casual sharers ("casual" being defined as up to at least 17 college students in a house - I set up an IP Masq server for a bunch of friends, and that's the # of users there - TW never cared, and never went after ANY of the 329820442234 apartments using it.

In fact, despite the contract saying it was verboten, TW employees would hang out on the Linux support forums and sometimes even give unofficial IP Masq advice. (This was the Ithaca, NY area)

The difference in this situation is - The users that got "the letter" advertised on the nycwireless site that they were running an open AP, saying, "Hey everyone, feel free to use my cable modem."

If it's for yourself and your friends, they don't care. If you're providing unmonitored open access to strangers, that's a different story.

Easy... or not?

[lfourrier]

For the ISP/customer relation, the one and only question is the contract between them. Is bandwith sharing prohibited or not.
If it is, WIFI or not, the customer is wrong.

One more annoying aspect is the fact that more and more law enforcement agency ask ISP to keep log of connection informations. This lead me to think that WiFi enthusiast sharing their connection, acting as local ISP, need something like the WGAP.
What's this ? The Wandering Guest Access Protocol is an idea I work on in my (few) spare times since a few month, permiting for a user sharing bandwith to deny responsability about some part of the traffic emanating from his network, notably by using an authentication of the Wandering Guest using its network. But there are so many legal and technical challenges I doubt I can publish any lifetime soon a satisfying presentation. Anybody wanting free WIFI networks being acceptables to the establishment must think about legal aspects. Else, the post 20010911 effect will provide the perfect excuse for the telcos to remove competition.

Re:I agree with them

[oyenstikker]

Great. Just make it known thats what the policy is.

Don't adversite Always On, Always Fast, Unlimited Internet and then provide Usually On, Only Fast from 1am to 8am and 5pm to 7pm, Limted No mta/sshd/ftpd/vncserver Internet. (Yes, I'm talking to you RoadRunner.)

Litmus test

[Gorimek]

Do you think you should be able to bring some friends to share your plate to an all you can eat restaurant? Or that you should be able to take home as much leftovers that you can carry?

Pay to add another telephone too?

[gelfling]

OK all you free market weenies you weren't even born when Ma Bell made you pay for every phone extention in your own house. They metered the voltage on the line and if they detected a drop the operator broke into your call and told you you were breaking the law and needed to pay for the extra extensions.

Is that the hill you want to die on?

Re:Pay to add another telephone too?

[Technician]

Telco's actualy measured the ringer load. They owned the phone which you rented at $5 per month per phone. Later you could have COME (Consumer Owned and Maintained Equipment) I got a call when I added an answering machine and 2 computers with modems. The combined ringers looked like a second phone. They didn't charge extra because they were daisy chained off the one jack. The ringer load was about 2 for the total ringer load. The phone company phone had a REN of 1 (Ringer Equivelance Number. 1 = power use of a regular mechanical bell) because it was a real bell (TM) phone and my modems were REN of .2 each and the answering machine was .5, thus my total REN was 1.9. Living alone meant only one phone was off hook at a time.
After the breakup of Ma Bell, it became legal to add your own jacks without having a monthly charge for each individual jack I added jacks and eliminated a major trip hazzard. For repair costs and service liabilities, this is where the Telco Interface came into the picture. Anything broken on their side of the interface is their responsibility and anything past it (in the home) is now the consumer's responsibility. Most older homes got the lightning arrestor replaced with a telephone interface box to define the sepration of consumer and telco property. They used to fix or replace broken phones for free because they owned them. Nowdays most phone companies guarantee the ringing power is adaquate for up to a total connected ringer load of REN 3 or less. This us usualy no longer a problem as most new phones have electronic ringers with a REN of 0.2 instead of 1.0 the old phones had. If you have too much ringer load, the voltage may become too low to properly ring your phones. If you call the phone company now with a complaint that your phones do not ring properly, they will usualy ask you to add up all the REN numbers of all the connected devices (modems, cordless phones, answering machines, faxes, etc. and make sure the total ringer load is less than 3 before sending a service technician. My dad when doing some construction (1960's) dropped a 2X6 on a phone and smashed it. It was replaced for free.

Re:I'm paying. It's MY connection and I'M PAYING.

[killmenow]

Cable Subscriber: What the fuck is their complaint?

Cable Exec: Well...see...we did some math and figured that we could sell cable internet services for $n per month and make a profit doing so. Our original calculations were based on assumptions about average customer usage. To make a long story short: we fucked up. It turns out there are people using WAY more bandwidth than we ever bargained for...and we find our profits unsatisfactory. So, we are rectifying our prior mistake. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere...

Another fine game of whack a mole...

[sterno]

Your mention of securing machines brings up a very good point relative to this. You can expect that, as wireless products get easier to work with (right now the stats on ease of use with Wi-Fi are appalling), they will be showing up in more homes. How many of these folks will have clue one about how to set these networks up to prevent roaming access? How many will really care?

In the end the providers will try to prvent this excess usage from happening, but they can hardly take on all of the people who simply forget to lock down their networks. They'll take on those who advertise, but then with the growing volume of wireless networks, will people really need to be advertising? You'll just go to wherever you want, whip out your roaming software, and be on-line. If anything your problems getting connected will likely be tied more to interference than lack of open networks.

Overall I'd expect that there will be a slight increase in overall network usage because of this extra roaming and this will end up causing a slight increase in prices and a balance will be achieved. The providers will go after egregious abusers and the rest of us will happily roam without them ever noticing.

Re:Problem Solved:

[renehollan]

This seams like the obvious solution, but it has problems: over what period do you average bandwidth use?

Most traffic patterns are very bursty, somewhat less so, if you aggregate foerign "freebee" Wifi traffic with your own (and that's generally the problem, because the traffic models break). There are times when I'd want to suck data flat out for a short period of time (downloading the latest GNU/Linux distro, for example), and I'll be damned if I have to suck that data through a bandwidth-capping straw. I like my 768kb/s downstream DSL speed for that, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, the US$80 a month I pay (includes $15 for a dedicated pair 'cuase I'm too far from the DSLAM to ride on top of POTS) is nowhere near what it costs to deploy 3/4 of a T1 line, so using that bandwidth flat out is out of the question. The presumption is that, over the course of a month, use will average out, despite the bursty nature.

Now, compare that to a modem capped at, oh, 128 kb/s. Flat out that's 41-1/2 gigabytes over the course of a month. A recent check of the past 6-1/2 days traffic into my home LAN via the firewall showed 149 MB. This works out to 269 bytes per second, about 700 MB over the course of a month. I haven't downloaded any new distros lately, so lets add, oh, 1.5 Gig to that (multiple CDs, restarted downloads, etc.) That adds up to 2.2 GB/month or 6784 b/s, sustained. My use is probably on the heavy side.

The point is that 6.8 kb/s is a far cry from a 128 kb/s rate cap. So, such a rate cap would be (a) crippling for the occasional massive download, and (b) still too high if the traffic were anywhere near steady, as if it were shared. About the only thing the 128 kb/s rate cap does is even out use of a shared medium. Load balancing during peak use times would be better, and is generally used on DSL connections (because of the centralized nature of aggregation), but would require dynamic control of upstream traffic from distributed cable modems in a cable environment, with it's own overhead issues (though TCP could be rate-limited by delaying packet ACKs, the "interesting" traffic is not TCP).

The only solutions this leaves us with are either (a) pitifully crippling rate caps, (b) metered access, or (c) a certain amount of "free" traffic, followed by metered access to the rest. Option (d), "use all you want until we tell you its a problem", while currently common is crude and fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding.

Now, with a more intelligent network, and local traffic rate capping, shaping, and balancing, interesting possibilities abound: why not permit open access during off-peak times, when there is a light load? To some extent, this needs to be saved to average out heavy use later, but there's no rule that says this has to be 100%, as it is now. Off-peak discounts for bandwidth become possible. Maybe I know I won't be downloading a new distro this month, and my use will be below normal. Maybe next month, my neighbor's will be below normal. Maybe between us (and others), we can offer that excess for free. How much should be under our individual control, but one can see an opportunity to smooth out a neighborhood's overall traffic use by dumping occasional "excess" for free access -- without going to the trouble to secure a dedicated fat pipe, setting up a company to manage it, etc.

This does require technical improvements (local traffic shaping and load-balancing, with shared ISP/user control -- imagine an "ISP meter" like an electric meter, but not as draconian as current attempts at this sort of thing that completely lock out the user), as well as looking at a user's average traffic pattern as averaged over their use over time more than over the sumultaneous use by other users (so, you don't balance you're low use as much against your neighbor's high use, but rather your higher use in the past or the future). This creates the opportunity for "credits" for unused bandwidth to carry from month to month, with some fraction "lost" if not used (you can't carry them forever -- the ISP would have to carry the credit on it's books as earned but unpaid in your favour). Given a "use it or lose it" scenario, sharing of unused bandwidth should naturally happen.

Bad analogy

[phillymjs]

If cable ISPs were all-you-can-eat restaurants:

"Thanks for your money, gentlemen! Here's you go, one plate each. Yes, we know that the plates are the size of a saucer even though our commercials say they're the size of a manhole cover. Now please, overlook that and go help yourself to anything. Oh, except, the sundae bar you heard is in places like this is off-limits to you. And you can't have the fried chicken wings, and you can forget about those bacon bits that you see in the salad bar, those are off limits to you, too. And if you gentlemen want to discuss business over your meal, you have to pay us more money."

"Excuse me, sir, what do you mean, 'Then what did I come here and pay good money for?' You can always sit at your table, sip a glass of water, have a slice of bread, and look at all the nice ads that are on the placemats. We worked very hard to sell that ad space so you customers wouldn't have to look a plain, blank placemats!"

"Oh, and please don't stay too long. Even though we say we never close, we sort of frown on people who keep the tables tied up for too long."

~Philly