VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service 558
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."
@home has that in its AUP but... (Score:2, Interesting)
What if AT&T upped your phone bill? (Score:4, Interesting)
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..)
Telecommuting IS a Business activity... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are TELECOMMUTING then you ARE a business customer. The only difference is that you aren't PAYING as a business customer.
Everyone can argue about if there should be different "classes" of service, but that is the business structure the Providers have chosen.
There will be people posting here "I use VPN but not for business." With those people I agree: Simply claiming the using VPN makes you a "business" customer is unfair.
But in the case where you ARE using the service as a business but want to only get charged the residential rate:
Quit your whining and stop being cheap
A business has the right to charge you the rates they see as fair and you have the right to not use their convenient service and start driving to work.
So how are they going to find out? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's wrong with this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
leftover from excite (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure comcast and cox will get a clue when they also fling excite the bord later next year.
Re:Rogers@Home (Score:1, Interesting)
Paying for business behavoir is wrong. (Score:2, Interesting)
My two cents,
Chad
Re:Your company can't afford it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Telecommuting IS a Business activity... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rogers@Home (Score:1, Interesting)
Sue them under Robinson-Patman? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong? Business class doesn't exist. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Home business lines are treated as residential (Score:3, Interesting)
But then modems came along - and the telcos had to beef up their switching equipment because evening residential usage jumped way up. That's why there was a short-lived proposal for a modem tax. But the telcos eventually figured out that selling second (and third lines) for modems, teenagers and other heavy users was more profitable than that tax, and a lot less politically explosive.
Nowadays, I doubt many telcos care about home business use - during the day there's excess capacity in the residential areas since they're currently designed to handle everyone getting online in the evening.
Re:@home has that in its AUP but... (Score:2, Interesting)
When an ISP/Telco/Cable company sells to residential, they are doing that selling based on the fact that *MOST* residential users will be using the service after hours of the business users, and they provision bandwidth and hardware based on that. (I may even be off by saying most, I *KNOW* that the cable company I used to wrk for did just that though)
When a residential user is using the bandwidth during business hours regularly there is less capacity to oversell the bandwidth. (Meaning they sell the business accounts based on the fact that the majority of businesses are 8AM-6PM, and residential based on the fact that the majority of residential use is 5-12PM. This isn't a hard number, just the fact that on all the graphing and business models I've seen this is how it is planned, obviously there is some overlap.
By getting the users who are connected during business hours onto a business rate, and those connected during residential hours on the residential rate allows the company to know exactly what kind of bandwidth they will have available for the businesses and sell that bandwidth/QOS based on that.
It's all a law of averages, and overall a few residential users staying home for the day sick, or working from home won't affect the averages all that much, the users who just have a home office and are sending large files over VPN's for residential rates to deserve to pay the business rates.
Again, it is thier business, they have the freedoms to run it how they see fit so long as they break no laws.
Re:How to classify a VPN? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I'm one of those lucky people who has a choice of cable modem at my house or several xDSL providers. So if the cable company ever decides to ban VPN's and if they ever figure out how to effectively enforce such a ban (doubtful) then I get to take advantage of competition.
The good news is for those of you without such a plethora of choices is that enforcement, AFAIK is currently impossible.
Re:What if AT&T upped your phone bill? (Score:2, Interesting)
Their tech's don't baulk when you say you're running linux - they ask you which kernel, distribution and dhcp client you're using
And (last time I looked) their AUP says you can run whatever servers you like so long as they don't cause loads of traffic and they're secure - security is the users problem. Blueyonder seem a bit less with it. Although they're happyish to work with linux they do have issues with some servers and have the x many concurrent connections rule and you must know the person you're dealing with.
It's nice working with a company that has a clue and listens to you when you explain service outages to them.
I just don't get it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just spent 10 minutes TRYING to find an "Acceptable Use Policy" or something similar.
It's just NOT THERE... Really, it seems, they don't *care* what you do with your Internet Service! Basic rate is $50/mo, Biz use starts at $65. (I subscribed to a plan they no longer offer, a single static IP for $50/mo)
I know, I'm in bed with that evil monopoly, Pac Bell, but Hey! This is COOL! I've run my own DNS/Web/Mail/Proxy/NTP/etc Linux server for 2 years without a hitch. No complaints, nothin' - and reliable bandwidth to boot.
I *LOVE* these guys! (Even if they ARE an evil monopoly)
-Ben
Re:Comcast offers business-class service? (Score:1, Interesting)
I talked to all the people at comcast about getting a business account but they told me that there are NO business uses if you are on the cable modem, period! Sure, comcast has business services, but they are leased line, T1 stuff that any ISP can offer you. The cable modem was strictly a residential service and they did not allow you to run any server processes at all - no exceptions.
For the typical Linux geek with web, dns, ssh etc, comcast cable modem is completely the wrong choice. Take a look at the cheaper DSL business services out there. They might cost about 2x ($90/mo) the residential cable modem, but that's life.
Point taken, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A View from the Other Side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A View from the Other Side (Score:2, Interesting)