[Tfug] why not cable?

[Ammon Lauritzen]

Steven Bowers wrote:
> * You are strictly prohibited from running any type of a server. Even
> something as innocuous as an SSH or RDP server.

I've never heard of anyone being prevented from / penalized for running
SSH on their machine. I've run low-bandwidth personal-use servers off
and on for years with Cox without a problem. An SSH connection into my
home machine to retrieve a file I forgot saves me an hour drive and
costs them the same bandwidth as if I had

They can't realistically enforce a ban on all "servers" since this
includes things like people hosting p2p games and such behavior would
run them out of business, so they only go after the servers that
actually cost them money. I remember not too long ago when ISP's used to
threaten people against plugging multiple machines into a
connection-sharing router. It's the same thing all over again.

The only standard tcp ports they actively block are 25 (incoming and
outgoing), and 80 (incoming). The public reason for this is to prevent
spam and viral propogation. And that's a valid reason. But it's not the
only reason.

In practice what it does is allow them to charge $80/mo for their
entry-level business accounts that offer significantly less bandwidth in
exchange for unblocking the ports to let people run their
little office web/mail servers.

My general advice any more is always cable for home/personal use, dsl if
you absolutely have to host public services out of your living room.

Cable hardware is less expensive and can be acquired from any number of
places in town. Good, *nix-compatible DSL modems that actually use
ethernet in stead of funky USB connectivity cost substantially more and
tend to be all but impossible to buy off of the shelf in Tucson. At
least, that was the case 3 years ago when I switched from my $65/mo
640/256kbit DSL plan to $45/mo for 3mbit/512kbit cable (which has since
been upgraded several times w/o any increase in monthly cost until this
latest upgrade - hence the letters everyone's getting).

I loved the DSL for its stability and for being able to call the net
admin on his cell phone. But my $300 Cisco modem router monstrosity blew
out after a bit over a year of heavy use and I was hard pressed to find
a replacement that I could justify as a broke college student :)

> Sure a 12M downstream connection is great. But how many sites have
> the server capacity and the bandwidth to support multiple,
> simultaneous 12M connections? Even MS which has massive amounts of
> bandwidth (mostly through Akamai) to support their user base are
> throttling speeds for things like service packs and such.

It's not about using 12Mbit for a single download, it's about
multi-tasking. Having excessive personal bandwidth at your disposal
allows you to download Ubuntu ISO's in the background while you play
video games w/o interrupting your wife's web browsing on another machine.

I'm on the normal plan (the one getting upgraded to 6Mbit in the near
future) and never actually want for downstream - unless I'm slurping
files from a remote fileserver of mine that has a 100Mbit upstream or
something.

Ammon