broadband access

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (jc at trillian.mit.edu)]

--------

|  This is the first time I've heard of this. I've had a lan behind a gateway
|  for atleast three months now, nothing's happened to me.
|  
|  I don't have a VPN, so, it doesn't really affect me. You should take that
|  up with RCN yourself :)
|  
|  Anyways. You can choose which stuff you want from RCN. You can get just
|  the cable modem, just the cable tv, just the phone, or cable modem + phone
|  (which is what I have), etc, etc.

One of the better (and funnier) stories  about  "tie-in"  sales  from
cable companies can be read at:
   http://www.geocities.com/flutocracy/cablemodem.htm

This is the story of a woman who ordered cable modem service  without
getting  the  cable  TV service, and found herself the defendent in a
criminal fraud case as a result.

There have been numerous suggestions that this was a wakeup  call  to
the  cable  industry,  who  have  widely  responded  by making the TV
service a mandatory part of getting a cable modem. When I looked into
RCN  a  few  months  ago,  they made it clear that to get cable modem
service, we would have to also  switch  our  cable  TV  service  from
Mediaone  to RCN.  This was stated clearly on one of their web pages,
in fact.  Maybe they've changed this policy since then.

|  Hope this helps, I like RCN.

It's useful to hear both good and bad stories.  Keep 'em coming ...

We're seriously considering another try at a real Internet connection
and  we'd  like  to  learn  what  we  can  from people other than the
companies themselves.  In particular, I'd be  interested  in  getting
lots  of info from people who want home "professional" service (i.e.,
not just web browsing) for systems other than Windows.

One of the very real problems with Mediaone's "no servers" policy was
that  they objected to my running telnetd and sshd.  Several people I
talked to made it clear that their service was only for running a web
browser,  and  any other use was at best a violation of their service
contract.  I'd like my home machine to be accessible from the Net, so
that  I  can occasionally grab programs and copy them to a machine at
work.  This is clearly outside Mediaone's model of what the  Internet
is for, and with only a dial-out connection, it isn't possible.  It's
also impossible if you can't (legally) run a server like sshd.

The basis of all this is the fact that the cable  companies  tend  to
see  the Internet as a new form of (low quality) TV.  It's just a new
form of entertainment.  Their management tends not to be aware of any
other  use, or if they hear about it, they don't approve.  This isn't
surprising, of course.  It'll probably be a decade or more until they
change this attitude (unless the gummint decides to step in and force
them to sell real Internet connections), so  the  rest  of  the  comm
industry has a while to try to get the market away from them.

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