ik wrote:
>I myself can not see or understand any reason why as a customer I need to be
>interested that the ISP have any issues with the cables companies.
>
Maybe I can shed some light on the use of dialers in cable modems.
Abroad, there is no such thing. You hook up your computer, you get an
IP, and you're done.
In Israel, however, there is a law that states that a connectivity
provider cannot also act as an ISP. That's why the cable companies
require you to also buy connectivity from an ISP. Ironically, if you buy
your connectivity from Med-1 (yes, they sell point 2 point connectivity,
though nobody seems to know about it), they will insist on not knowing
what you route through it, lest they be violating the above law.
The network infrastructure is such that if you connect via DHCP, your
cable operator needs to know which ISP you belong to. They then allocate
an IP for you from that ISP's IP pool, and you are connected. The
information regarding who connected when never reaches the ISP, and they
have no control over it. In fact, there have been cases in which the
cables company associated a customer to the wrong ISP by mistake, and
only when that client would call about an unrelated problem would such
an error be caught. All that time, the customer would use up the wrong
ISP's bandwidth for all operations.
For that reason, ISPs prefer not to allow you to use DHCP directly. They
prefer that you establish a tunnel with their termination servers
(called PNS, I don't remeber what the TLA stands for), and thus they
have control over who's connected, and when.
Shachar
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