Hello Oleg, On Sep 26, 18:06, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more > > Amir, > > First, regardless of how satisfied the Linux-IL members are with your > answers, I would like to thank you for treating the matter seriously > enough to personally subscribe to this list and participating so > actively. I hope that as a compensation you are getting some useful > feedback from a bunch of heavy users.
Yes, the feedback is indeed useful. > I may have missed you addressing the point in the long thread, but as > additional feedback I would like to re-iterate the reason why I > decided against becoming an Actcom customer a few years ago. It was > solely because Actcom were so insistent that I should tell them in > writing how many computers I had at home. My pointing out that if I > lied they would never get past my firewall and NAT to verify it didn't > help. > > I don't like lying, especially in writing, and the price for 2 > computers was several times higher than for one (my memory may be > faulty - a lot higher anyway). I don't think I got a better deal from > a competitor (compared to Actcom's single computer quote), but they > specifically said they didn't care what I had on my home network. I > could not accept Actcom's insistence on the "single computer" clause. > > The rest of my original message was pure speculation that your "buy > bandwidth wholesale / sell retail" margins were narrower than the > competitors, and that you were assuming that a user with several > computers would use more bandwidth than the average (not true in my > case). > > I am curious to know what the real reasons were. The main reason was of support. We found that users with many computers in their local network generate many more support calls. This was especially true in the older days of the Internet. Customers had a mix of OSs (Win3.11, Win95/98, WinMe, even DOS, sometimes Macs). For example, some users often used to lose their connection or mail definitions of some of their computers and used to call us to help to restore them on each of their computers (even several times each month), etc. We tried to make it clear that supporting more than one computer is more costly. But we ended up saying in the contracts that support will be given to one computer only. > On the original topic of the thread, I now have a no-dialer cable > connection with one of your competitors, it's a business deal, etc. I > must say that as a customer I see a lot of advantages in direct DHCP, > and I will insist on having no dialer in my future dealings with > ISPs. Your point that lack of dialer makes it harder for you to track > abuse makes me wonder why I - a paying and law-abiding customer - > should be inconvenienced. I think you will agree with me that even law-abiding customers can get a Virus, Trojan, or Spam-Zombie into their computers, or a cracker may use their computers (remotely) for cracking activities (like port scanning and DoS). And, BTW, the magnitude of this problem may be proportional to the number of computers the user has, and the difficulty of finding which computer has the problem (Virus, backdoor etc.) is also proportional to the number of computers. > As Nadav pointed out, there should be an > easy way for the cable provider to notify you whenever an IP address > is assigned to a particular MAC, without any need for a dialer on the > customer's side. I am glad to hear that you have a project running to > implement just that. It will be great if/when we succeed. But it depends on the willing and ability of the Cable companies to supply us the needed info in real time (and each of the 3 ones has a different system). It is not going to be an easy project, if at all it is possible. > By the way, as quite a few others on this list I use my Internet > connection at home to connect to my employer's LAN over VPN. It was my > employer who insisted on a no-dialer setup because the protocols > dialers use (L2TP, PPTP) interfere with the VPN stack. Therefore, for > some of us a dialer is simply not an option. An L2TP router would solve this problem too. You will also get the ability to get a real static IP - if this is needed (the IP you get in the direct connection is not really static even if the Cable company gives you a long lease, due to occasional infrastructure "splits"). > Best regards, > > -- > Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org Amir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
