Why would you need to pay for this service?
Cant you just get the standard issue broadband internet connection and then buy your own networking kit,- router, cables, etc.
I have heard Roadrunner and a DSL service in my area advertise that you can hook up more than one computer if you purchase a plan for X amount of dollars a month (in addition to the standard broadband fees). I suppose some will fall for this. They probably come to your house and do all the wiring and equipment setup and then charge you a small fee per month to recoupe the initial costs.
Is there any way they can restrict use to one computer and prevent someone from networking on their own without paying the ‘networking’ fee?
Yes, setting up a home network isn’t that hard - providing you have the skills.
I don’t think what these companies are proposing (or charging) is outrageous. Consider that the average computer user barely knows how to turn the thing on, much less set up a network. My mother, for example, is pretty damn good with computers. Her job (before she retired) sent her to a lot of training classes, and she’s definitely on the high end of the curve as far as computer use. Yet, if I were to ask her to set up a network, she’d certainly balk.
As far as the monthly charge, I can see that too. I assume they offer some level of tech support in case things go wrong.
Ain’t no big thing as far as I’m concerned. They offer a service and charge for it. For those of us with enough knowledge to do it ourselves, we don’t have to pay for it.
The only way that some ISPs restrict the access is that they program the DSL modem to only give internet access to a specific network card, which is determined by the MAC address of the network card. Every network card in the world is manufactured with a unique address called the MAC address, which looks something like this: 00-0B-B9-6A-9C-3B.
This is easily defeated by MAC address Spoofing, which most DSL firewalls/routers have the ability to do. All you need to do is program the router with the MAC address of the network card that has been assigned to the DSL modem, and Bob’s your uncle.
One reason that they want to do this is when they sell a broadband connection for a single computer, they expect the user to use a certain amount of bandwidth a month. If I buy a broadband connection and then share it with, say, forty guys in my fraternity house, that account is using way more bandwidth than normal. For the same reason, broadband providers usually don’t allow you to run a server from your broadband connection. On the other hand, a single computer might use a lot of bandwidth. If I’m downloading files constantly on my single computer, I might be using more bandwidth than my neighbor with three computers that are only being used to surf the web.
So, yes, they can ask you to pay for having more than one computer connected. However, as Anonymous Coward pointed out, using MAC address spoofing, you can make it appear that only one computer is connected. An alternative to charging for multiple computers is to charge based on the bandwidth used each month.
There have been reports at places such as Slashdot that companies have come up with techniques to determine if multiple computers are behind a broadband router. This might be used in the future to force people to pay extra for multi-computer Internet sharing. Urrrrrrggggghhhh!
They know people are sharing connections, they’re just waiting until everyone is hooked and then they’ll start “enforcing” the already published rules.
I’m an Internet old timer. The classic model is you pay based on the size of the “pipe”. How much stuff you cram thru that pipe is your business.
Actually, this is incorrect provided that you all use your own switch and connect through the same cable modem. Bandwidth is shared between the filters, or modems, themselves attached to a single network segment, and then the bandwidth allotted at that filter will be split among all the computers connected to it.
If you pay for one 3.1 Mbps line coming in, the cable company will provide you with a modem capable of pulling only that much. Connecting one computer to it will result in that computer having the full 3.1 Mbps available to it. If you connect two computers to that one modem, they will have to share the available bandwidth to that modem, giving each one of them 1.55 Mbps each.
If you connect forty computers to one cable modem, each one of you (if you are all online at the same time) will get one fortieth the bandwidth your specific modem can pull. If the cable company tells you otherwise, they are either mistaken or lying.
Which, unless you have illegally uncapped your modem, will never be higher than the allocated amount of bandwidth from your ISP, which is what your fee is based on, so I can’t really see their complaint with ‘You’re using more than your share of the bandwidth.’
The real scarcity in terms of cable modems is the IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are kind of at a premium these days, and each computer connected directly to a cable modem because it is an Ethernet techology built to work over WAN distances would have to get its own DHCP assigned IP address. If you want to avoid that, and give the cable company only one MAC address/IP address combination to deal with, you get yourself an inexpensive router and set it up so that the router has a public IP address, and the rest of the computers connected to it have either dynamically assigned or static private IP addresses. Anything in the 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 range, 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 range and 192.168.0.0 - 168.255.255 range are freely available for private use without needing to register them. Using those on your local machines and NAT to do your address translation from private to public or public to private will allow multiple computers online without needing to purchase separate IP addresses for each computer.
At any rate, no matter how many computers you connect, they will share the maximum bandwidth allocated to your modem, and will not go beyond that point thereby unfairly using your neighbor’s bandwidth.
Yea, it’s easy for you and I to hook up a router and spoof the MAC address, but consider the Average User has no idea what they’re doing and if they have trouble, they’ll wet themselves. Just think of it as a Stupid Tax. Or a Lazy Tax.
Even if your cable modem service promises a 3.1Mbps pipe, I doubt that they plan for 100% utilization of that much bandwidth all the time. I’m just guessing, but I think that they expect that you might use that much bandwidth a few times a month when downloading. But I think they expect that most of the month their users are using only a fraction of that much bandwidth.
Plus isn’t cable modem service set up so that a 3.1Mbps line is shared by as many as 255 users?
Bellsouth ships you a DSL modem that doesn’t play nice with most routers unless you screw around with the internal settings of both the router and the modem. Most users wouldn’t know how to do this, and so they sell a “home networking kit” with a special modem and router that will work together. Then, they charge you for it monthly.
Nice of them, eh?
At that point it becomes a matter of what’s in your contract. This is why I generally favor DSL over cable modem, since it’s clearly spelled out in the DSL agreement what bandwidth I am specifically paying the company for. I have gotten into it with one of the cable companies (Charter) over actually using the bandwidth I paid for, and they eventually backed down, but it wasn’t easy.
Yeah, in some places. Which is why if your neighborhood has cable modem and a lot of people in the neighborhood have accounts, you could end up seeing pretty significant bandwidth degredation. Thankfully in some locations they’re actually upping the pipeline for the segment, and leaving the modems themselves set anywhere from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in order to alleviate that problem. Otherwise, cable starts looking like a really expensive, really slow counterpart to DSL.
Yeah, which is why at every opportunity I do try to explain to the people in my neighborhood who ask me how I hooked up all my computers how they can do it too. I get quite a few calls from neighbors wanting to hook something up.