On Saturday, 2003-03-29 at 23:22 CST, Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
William Allen Simpson wrote:
(Some DSL/cable companies try to charge per machine, and record the machine address of the devices connected.)
And to use NAT to circumvent this should be illegal. It is theft of service.
No, it is not theft of service. It doesn't cost an ISP more for me to have 20 machines than it does if I have just 1. Nor does it cost them if I use NAT. What might cost them more is if I use more bandwidth or use additional IP addresses (for which there may be an associated expense). But a user with one machine can potentially use as much or more bandwidth than a user with 20. There simply isn't a decent correlation between number of machines and amount of service consumed. Even so, an ISP doesn't have a legitimate complaint against users that are simply consuming the bandwidth that the ISP advertised as being part of their service. Tony Rall