Well, I didn't want to go into the other providers, AGAIN. Those are all fairly well-understood likelihoods by now. I did get my shot in though on the wireless broadband thing. They can only handle so much stream at a time, even if they do switch to the next bloak quickly.
A client (an engineering fella who I've worked with extensively over the past two or three years) who happens to be a TCP/IP maven stuck his head into my office the other day to use me as a sounding board. He was livid. Seems his provider (Comcast @Home) is putting the screws to him and other VPN users. SPs can detect who VPN users are by filtering TCP port numbers, btw, so it's not like paying residential phone rates while you use the phone for business. Here, they got ya.
They are cutting him off unless he subscribes to @Work. Hmm... He is besides himself with this, because he has tallied his VPN usage stats and they are far lower than what he chalks up when surfing or using the web for other purposes.
This person, btw, wrote the gateway and policy code for one of this country's largest private intranets (VPNs), which causes this whole thing to stick in his craw all that much more.
His take, and I happen to agree with him on this count, is that Home knows that they can exact more revenue in the way of higher subscription fees from corporations (who often pay the VPN subscription costs directly, but not in this case) than they can from residential subscribers, so they will use the "label" of VPN to enforce their ploy, even if the traffic stats don't warrant it in any given case. Well, it's akin to a ploy, if they don't provide QoS guarantees to legitimate VPN users, and if they do enforce their policies on VPN users whose usage is only occasional, or very light.
Which brings up the interesting prospect of having two different classes of service over a single HFC loop, one for the kids and one for VPN use. Hmm.. again. Do you suppose then that each would be suject to minutes-based, or some other means of billing based who uses the service, and for how long?
All of this, of course, doesn't begin to address the fact that the HFC (and wireless services and dsl loops, alike, at some point) isn't going to handle a boatload of legitimate VPN users and power-user work-at-homes, anyway. Leastwise, not during peak hours and during popular webcasts, which, I hear, are sure to be rise before long. I suppose that this form of enforcement is one way to thwart such an eventuality... by cutting them off.
I asked him if he thought about speaking with the folks over in Equinix, or some other neutral Internet exchange, to set up a spoof account that would pass him through to his VPN and vice versa. Of course, I would never endorse such a thing... |
