[Coco] Re: I'm back

[Roger Taylor]

At 03:46 PM 2/14/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>>Folks, my ISP (Charter Communications) decided to block all incoming 
>>ports into their network for those customers those who either can't 
>>afford to go out and buy a firewall device, or don't know better.
>
>Which level of service do you have?  If it is their residential level, 
>Charter has not permitted servers to be run for quite a while, even though 
>they may not have apparently enforced it until recently.
>
>   http://www.chartercom.com/products/internet/aup.asp
>   charter.net section 1A - No servers
>
>Looking at their terms of service they apparently have offerings that 
>allow users to run servers.  Adelphia does not.
>With Adelphia, my ports are not blocked, but if they discover me running 
>any type of server, be it HTTP, FTP, TELNET, SMTP or what ever, Adelphia's 
>official policy is to disconnect service, and charge $25.00 for 
>reconnection on the first offense.
>
>-John
>wb8tyw at qsl.net
>Personal Opinion Only


This is one reason that the internet has not really become the "internet" 
yet.  When folks tell us we can't serve content, yet our download quota is 
through the roof (can download a 699meg DivX movie every 6 hours or so, for 
example), then their purpose really has no purpose.  Most broadband 
companies will even slow your data rate down to a snail's speed if you go 
beyond the download traffic limit, yet you're not allowed to even serve a 
single 64k file via FTP or perhaps have a telnet connection to your 
computer?  And you usually don't get to see this upfront and if you do it's 
on the last page in very small print.

But getting to your response to Boisy about why he was having trouble, I 
trust that he knows what he's talking about.  Nothing in his announcement 
made me want to go study the customer policy book to see if he was wrong or 
to put him on the spot.  :)  Anyway, you gave a pretty good tutorial for 
the rest of the group who might not know what goes on behind the scenes 
with greedy ISPs.  We're all customers of one, so it's nice to know more of 
the truth.

My 2 cents.


----------
Roger Taylor