AT&T security by neutering?

[Boston_Bob]

Hi,

I recently went to my parents house and found that AT&T had blocked many ports/applications from working over their network. I know this may not be news to you all, but I havent been on a residential connection in 5 years. (University's OC-3 aint too shabby:)) Now I understand they dont want you running web servers so they block port 80 (official reason "security" against nimda and other IIS attacks), and MS networking stuff has never been very secure so they block that now too. It seems to me that if things keep up this way they are just going to keep neutering our broadband connection until it becomes a big pipe for sending pop-up ads and spam. The thing that really bothers me is that it is all done to "protect" us. Im just waiting for file-sharing to be blocked next, you know its coming. No doubt that will be to provide better security as well.

Any thoughts?

Side note, does anyone know about the "open carriage" clause for the telecomunications industry? IF cable service is regulated as a telecommunications service, wouldnt that require them to lift restrictions like this?

Sorry for the rant, but it really bothers me that they do this.

Bob

[TonyT]

I don't have a problem with ISP's blocking ports at all, on residential services. Residential services via cable and adsl are sold as 'entertainment". A business class service cannot be restricted as such. Trouble is, there are not many cable companies selling business class services, or the services are not available in all areas of service.

I'm glad they block port 80 and a few others. There are way too many "service thieves" running http and ftp servers that hog the bandwidth, slow the network and drive up costs for everyone else. (downstream costs the isp pennies/GB anmd upstream costs em upwards to a buck or two/GB.)

[Soporific]

Just curious, how would they block port 80 and still allow http traffic?

And how does it cost them pennies to transmit down and bucks to transmit up? All the cached pages?

~S

[TonyT]

They do not block port 80 requests downstream, they block port 80 requests upstream.

Your ISP also has an ISP. They must purchase bandwidth from their ISP and bandwidth costs pennies per Gig downstream for a large ISP. The expensive part is upstream bandwidth. Liken it to the costs of receiving a phone call vs. making a long distance call.

For instance, Earthlink and AOL both use UUNet as their main ISP. Cox uses AT&T. RR uses Sprint I beliebve.