> From: Simon Leinen <simon.leinen@xxxxxxxxx>
> In the eyes of your ISP, you were misbehaving, because you were
> violating their assumption that you would use ONE (1) computer with that
> connection. If you had been what they consider an honest citizen, you
> would have gotten a "commercial" connection to connect more than one.
I suspect it had a lot more to do with their customer service setup; they were
not, after all, hiring computer scientists. They worked off scripts, and the
script needed a known quantity connected to the port (I would guess the only
handled Windows boxes and Apple machines). With 7 different kinds of Brand-X
NAT boxes (some of which had limited maintainence capabilities), their scripts
would not have worked.
Besides, they had other ways to sort out the commercial from residential
customers; for one, they filtered out incoming SMTP connections (although this
might have been as much to prevent clueless home users from being spam vectors
by running open relays, etc as anything else). I would assume they filtered
out incoming HTTP connections too.
Don't forget, in some ways a NAT box probably works _against_ an ISP's
interests, because they'd probably _like_ to be able to charge for each
machine connected up. (Many cable TV suppliers try to charge for multiple TVs,
don't forget). But I suspect the difficulty of connecting multiple machines
_without_ a NAT box (you've got to have a real router, and configure it, etc),
and its attendant increase in customer service costs (not to mention the
increased demand for address space), led them to throw up their hands.
Anway, this is all just speculation on our part. IMO, further discussion
without some real data on how the ISPs saw this is just a waste of time.
>> I guess this is just a long-winded, engineering take on 'the customer
>> is always right'.
> were our (we being the IETF) customers the ISPs, the users .., the
> vendors of then-current equipment, the vendors of potential
> circumvention solutions (NATs)?
> These groups of customers probably didn't agree on what they wanted.
> Were all of them right?
Excellent point. Have to go away and ponder that one for a while.
Noel