Cable Labs wants to revise/eliminate NAT

[blstriker]

Saw this at DSLreports.com a few days ago: Cable Labs wants to revise/eliminate NAT

 

[skeletal29]

well right now its either hey keep running and loose a little money or eliminate nat and then they will have almost no customers and tey will lose even more money.ITS THEIR CHOICE.LOLLHAHAHHAH

 

[Garion]

Man, these people need to get over themselves. Sure, if you're sharing your access with your neighbors, that is bad. But @home actually encouraged their users to purchase Linksys routers from them. I certainly don't feel guilty about having one!

I was rather surprised about @home's gouging us for $5 for a second IP. What's the real cost to them? The only legitimate answer is that IP's have to be aquired and maintained in the routers and routing tables and there's a cost for that, but certainly not $60/address/year.

In reality, those of us who are using NAT are actually doing a good thing for the Internet. IP's are getting scarce and we're conserving them. In fact, without NAT now, we'd have LONG ago run out of real IP's. I know that my company's network alone would need a couple of full class B's to IP all of the machines.

So yeah.. We get extra machines without paying for it with a home router. But what's the problem? Two machines don't mean twice as much bandwidth. Holier-than-thou articles like this really annoy me.

- G

 

[Tallgeese]

what a load of cr@p!

 

[Louie1961a]

I don't know about you, but I pay for my cable service according to bandwith levels. There is a 500/128 for $29.95/month, a 1000/256, for $49.95/month, etc., etc. So if I pay for 500kbpd download bandwith, I would think I have a legal right to use that bandwith anyway I want. The cable company can always take steps to throttle down my bandwith to the contracted level, but beyond that, I fail to see how they can legally tell you how you can use or share your bandwith. My TOS stipulate non-commercial use, and no game servers. It doesn't say I can't connect 253 users via my SMC barricade. Anyone who says I am stealing is just wrong. I am abiding by the pre-agreed upon terms of service. This article is akin to saying, "OK, I am going to sell you this happy meal, but you better not share your fries with anyone else in the car" It is rediculous.

 

[jfunk]

Yeah,

I pay for 1 IP address and a certain amount of bandwidth. How can I possibly be stealing without taking more than that?

Thats like saying if I buy a foot long sub from the deli, eat half of it and give the other half to a friend, I have somehow stolen from the deli.


j

 

[StandardCell]

What they are afraid of is people who will install wireless routers or actual physical cabling to their neighbor's house, and serve the entire block or several homes. Doing that is dishonest IMO, and if you're dumb enough to run wireless networking without going through some type of real encryption, you're dumb enough to get hacked. But the point is that they want one customer per home. I can understand that.

It used to be, if anyone remembers, that the cable company had a problem with people who were splitting their cable connection so they could have cable tv in every room. They wanted to be able to charge customers per outlet, but the practice stopped a long time ago. This is BS, of course, but I think there may be some of that motivation yet again.

Whatever the case, $5/extraIP/month is as ridiculous as the "CAT" idea for getting rid of NAT. I'll NAT the crap out of everything if I want to. I very seriously doubt that the NAT replacement idea will catch on, because there will be a massive backlash and a risk of alienating customers who want to just share the connection with the family.