Compulsory routers

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 1. December 2015 14.42.21 xdrudis at tinet.cat wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 10:37:31AM +0100, Giel van Schijndel wrote:
> > So my conclusion: even if it's legal according to your contract to use
> > your own router, you still risk being treated as a second class
> > customer.
> 
> That risk might be half a blessing, sir.
> 
> In my experience customer support is so pitiful (in telcos in general,
> I don't know about NL) that anything that drives them to quickly
> ignore you is better than the usual deal of ignoring you after wasting
> a long chunk of your time.

Agreed. However, the lack of "separation of concerns" is a serious issue.

Fortunately, my service is provided through a dedicated cable modem, and the 
router behind it is not provided by the ISP. In fact, when I first subscribed, 
I think the idea was that customers would only have one computer using the 
Internet, and I think that UPC (as it was then) were trying to sell routers to 
"allow" multiple computers to use the Internet at the same time: such magic!

I haven't pushed the boundaries of what kind of routing I could achieve, and 
one could easily argue that the ISP should be imposing any necessary 
restrictions on the equipment in their possession, not logging into people's 
routers (or their routers in other people's possession) and messing around.

It all sounds like another mechanism for denying proper service: the network 
drops out but they point to your router configuration, as if that's the reason 
why you can't access the Internet and not some fault at their end (which is 
almost always is).

Paul