Amir, First, regardless of how satisfied the Linux-IL members are with your answers, I would like to thank you for treating the matter seriously enough to personally subscribe to this list and participating so actively. I hope that as a compensation you are getting some useful feedback from a bunch of heavy users.
I may have missed you addressing the point in the long thread, but as additional feedback I would like to re-iterate the reason why I decided against becoming an Actcom customer a few years ago. It was solely because Actcom were so insistent that I should tell them in writing how many computers I had at home. My pointing out that if I lied they would never get past my firewall and NAT to verify it didn't help. I don't like lying, especially in writing, and the price for 2 computers was several times higher than for one (my memory may be faulty - a lot higher anyway). I don't think I got a better deal from a competitor (compared to Actcom's single computer quote), but they specifically said they didn't care what I had on my home network. I could not accept Actcom's insistence on the "single computer" clause. The rest of my original message was pure speculation that your "buy bandwidth wholesale / sell retail" margins were narrower than the competitors, and that you were assuming that a user with several computers would use more bandwidth than the average (not true in my case). I am curious to know what the real reasons were. On the original topic of the thread, I now have a no-dialer cable connection with one of your competitors, it's a business deal, etc. I must say that as a customer I see a lot of advantages in direct DHCP, and I will insist on having no dialer in my future dealings with ISPs. Your point that lack of dialer makes it harder for you to track abuse makes me wonder why I - a paying and law-abiding customer - should be inconvenienced. As Nadav pointed out, there should be an easy way for the cable provider to notify you whenever an IP address is assigned to a particular MAC, without any need for a dialer on the customer's side. I am glad to hear that you have a project running to implement just that. By the way, as quite a few others on this list I use my Internet connection at home to connect to my employer's LAN over VPN. It was my employer who insisted on a no-dialer setup because the protocols dialers use (L2TP, PPTP) interfere with the VPN stack. Therefore, for some of us a dialer is simply not an option. Best regards, -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
