[ILUG] There's one for everyone in the audience - and even for those who weren't

[Jeroen Massar]

Shakira Kelly wrote:
> I would have thought that if you share broadband that that would make
> you in essence an ISP and then you would need a licence? 
>  
> Regardless according to eircoms ts&cs at
> http://broadbandsupport.eircom.net/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/&/?St=44&E=0000000000041804656&K=3716&SXI=1&E=0000000000041804656&St=44&K=3716&SXI=1&problem=termsandconditions&branch=4
> section 7.1 you cant provide service to a third party 

How come then that Eircomm gives these nice quite Netopia's for free
along with their subscription? :) It can be used by anybody who figures
out the keys... It is then also 'sharing' bandwidth.

From that perspective, they won't notice a thing between having 1
wireless box or a Fon box.

The bigger problem I see are the download caps that apparently are in
place here (they don't even have such a concept at most dutch ISP's*)
Are these caps actually enforced at Eircom and how do they do that
(lower bandwidth even more, cut you off... etc)

I tend to shove big files (legit work stuff, not even kidding :) over
the intarweb, a such I am most likely going to hit it one day, but then
what?

This is interesting for the Fonera deal too, especially when some other
"Linus", as they call it, uses your bandwidth for free, while you pay
for it. You go over the limit and then what? Then again I recall from
the presentation that the device had something like a setting for
limiting certain things and QoS stuff etc.

The other thing that I don't really like about the Fon thing is the fact
that they are sort of collecting data about usage, though they claim
only of the Linus/Bills/Bobs/whatever they named them and not the owner.
What I really don't like about the concept is that somebody else has
access to a device on my network. But you can also think of it as it
being upstream at a provider where you have only limited control over,
thus firewall that Fon thing away and where possible put it in a
separate vlan on your WRTG.... *whistle*

Greets,
 Jeroen

* = At one of them the excuse for not doing it was the fact that
counting the traffic was too much work/overhead/bla. The other excuse
was that the baseline user doesn't use so much traffic anyway, thus on
average, even with folks doing 400G (mostly NNTP) per month, those folks
doing maybe 1Gb max the average came down to 10G/month anyway.

(hmm Thunderbird spellcheck doesn't even want to correct intarweb to
internet ;)