ISP spying

Aekeron said:
It's hardly 'evil' of a company to contact high bandwidth users personally and ask them why they're doing it, rather than just randomly enforcing bandwidth limits, STMs or FUPs.
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If you talk 24/7 over the phone no one will ever call you and ask why. It is very simple, since BT will make a fortune out of you and you hardly stress the network. With xDSL however, is like having 20 calls at the same time which you pay a flat rate for.

The problem with ISPs is that their cheapo hardware and links are overloaded heavy. THe business customers (paying thousands of pounds) keep calling in crying about congestion on the network and the tech people shape home users to ease the load.

It's all about marketing double digit connection capacities (not speed, as they wrongly advertise. speed goes with delay) and then hiding behind 6pt character fair usage policies.
 
Actually, at one point talking over the phone that much *would* have sparked an investigation. This was a long time ago when the infrastructure wasn't quite as developed as it is now.... Sound like familiar situationt at all...?

There's quite a lore more to it than your message suggests, though I completely agree that most ISPs do advertise via highly dubious means.
 
cavemanoc said:
From my previous:

Essentially it is OK to use the full bandwidth for which you pay, provided you have a good reason/note from your mum/term paper due. But not if you don't feel like explaining why you have chosen to use it :(
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Well, strictly you didn't pay for it. You paid for it at a specified contention ratio subject to fair use policies. Given that, our contracts say we'll take action where necessary to protect our network from 'abusive usage' and thats our right. We could, like Virgin media or whoever else, just shape users off the cuff, however we choose to contact very high volume users and discuss the situation with them.

I think it's a reasonable approach to take, if a user can't match that reasonable approach and says 'mind your own business' then we have little option but to follow the letter of our contracts and shape them.

As said, I'm lucky to deal with businesses and so the only home users are homeworkers. (Which also means if we shape their connection we'll inform their IT department why we did so and present a traffic profile - which could be interesting if a homeworker is downloading films on a connection their employer pays for).

I'd hate to have to deal with consumer ADSL, there isn't a winning approach right now, shape and you're damned or cap and you'll get no business!

We don't falsely advertise our products, we're aiming at big business and we're not cheap (we provide homeworker connections for several national newspapers as an idea of our ADSL customer base). I don't like the advertising and small print policies that a great many consumer ISPs get involved in these days, we steer well clear but it still affects us (IT directors asking 'BT are doing ADSL for £20 a month, why is yours £35?' is a common theme - though we lost 6 customers on cost grounds last year and 3 of them have sicne come crawling back...)
 
drak3 said:
The problem with ISPs is that their cheapo hardware and links are overloaded heavy. THe business customers (paying thousands of pounds) keep calling in crying about congestion on the network and the tech people shape home users to ease the load.
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The fact is that £25 a month ADSL doesn't fund gigabit backbone networks very well, core routers are expensive beasts - a dozen new routers for our london core cost us over $1.5m, if you want to see real investment from consumer ISPs then broadband would have to cost £50 a month and then people complain about high prices.

Cheapo hardware it's not!
 
What we do retain is email and radius logs since the beginning of time...
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emailed logs and content? Of your users?? Uhmm why? :confused: Is there a basement somewhere and 3 guys are sitting round drinking beer going through thousands of private emails?

Thats just so wrong on so many levels.... You reckon it says in most ISPS t&cs that they retain the right to look at all users emails?

when you mean email do you mean the ISPS email provision or email via things like gmail/yahoo etc?

In my work i havent signed any contract which gives them the legal right to violate my privacy on a whim of theirs. (NHS)
 
You'll have agreed to a policy that allows them to monitor your email and inet access if they choose to - it's standard with the NHS.

BigRedShark's company aren't doing anything particularly illegal or nefarious - just suffering for being honest and open on a forum of consumers that don't really understand how things work.
 
Surfer said:
emailed logs and content? Of your users?? Uhmm why? :confused: Is there a basement somewhere and 3 guys are sitting round drinking beer going through thousands of private emails?

Thats just so wrong on so many levels.... You reckon it says in most ISPS t&cs that they retain the right to look at all users emails?

when you mean email do you mean the ISPS email provision or email via things like gmail/yahoo etc?

In my work i havent signed any contract which gives them the legal right to violate my privacy on a whim of theirs. (NHS)
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We're required by law to retain email and radius logs for a certain period (so the police could see if an email was sent or who had which IP when - on production of a warrent obviously.

We never look at them, compressed they're not huge and they just gather dust on a SAN
 
I dont see any problem with ISPs keeping logs of emails sent/recieved, as long as the content is encrypted by the ISP except for origin and destination. If for whatever reason the police request such information it can be decrypted for them, but i see no reason any isp should store the email information in plain text that can be accessed by anyone working for the ISP.
 
Aekeron said:
I'm sure they don't just have a big folder of customer emails that anyone can access whenever they feel like it :p
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of course not. Its proberly on a CD labeled "Customer emails" which each isp employee keep in their car for no real reason, other then to get stolen along with the car.:p
 
Dist said:
I dont see any problem with ISPs keeping logs of emails sent/recieved, as long as the content is encrypted by the ISP except for origin and destination. If for whatever reason the police request such information it can be decrypted for them, but i see no reason any isp should store the email information in plain text that can be accessed by anyone working for the ISP.
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Well perhaps because thats how the customer sends it, in plain text. We don't encrypt but access needs a login for the log server connected to the SAN volume, which isn't generally given out (I think 4 people have it)
 
bigredshark said:
Well perhaps because thats how the customer sends it, in plain text. We don't encrypt but access needs a login for the log server connected to the SAN volume, which isn't generally given out (I think 4 people have it)
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Are you familiar with the Tor network? http://www.torproject.org they provide anonymity by using onion routing, so the endpoints you record will be useless, and everything is encrypted within the network except at the endpoints. Would using something like this make your logs worthless? Sure the RADIUS logs and IPs will be legit still, but packet contents would be encrypted and destination addresses would be irrelevant. I respect that in your case you are only interested in bandwidth usage which this doesn't hide, but surely this kind of technique makes 'ISP Spying' pretty limited?
 
I was under the impression that the a great number of Tor users don't actually know how to configure it properly so they often leave 'incriminating' to be logged...
 
Surely its better for the ISP to have logs of your email, then some random bloke hosting a TOR exit node.
 
bigredshark said:
snip
I'd hate to have to deal with consumer ADSL, there isn't a winning approach right now, shape and you're damned or cap and you'll get no business!
snip
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Not really aimed at you BigRedShark, but if caps were enforced by all ISPs, then everybody would still get business. It's the 'Unlimited' marketing that has got UK broadband in this mess. If there were tiered pricing I think that would work much better. If Downloading Johnny wants to get 1.2Tb a month, let him- but make sure he's on the correct tariff before you let him. I wonder how much that would be?

My current ISP gives me a cap of 330Gb, and I know that it's total hogwash- if all their customers downloaded that, they'd go bust/network would melt. So why the heck are they telling me I can DL that much? Why not be fair, and say I can have 50Gb for £30 (or whatever is a realistic price)? It's the one-upmanship by ISPs marketing departments that get people confused.


Don't get me started on BT, if their new logos that cost millions to develop are supposed to reflect their move into the data industry rather than strictly voice, why aren't they investing in the infrastructure? With my limited knowledge, 21Cn seems to be 2 years late and it's not even here yet.
 
Assuming it's configured properley, yes, tor would limit the usefulness of traffic analysis. The thing is, it in itself has fairly easily recognisable traffic patterns and in our customer base it's usage wouldn't be normal.
 
Bossk128 said:
Not really aimed at you BigRedShark, but if caps were enforced by all ISPs, then everybody would still get business. It's the 'Unlimited' marketing that has got UK broadband in this mess. If there were tiered pricing I think that would work much better. If Downloading Johnny wants to get 1.2Tb a month, let him- but make sure he's on the correct tariff before you let him. I wonder how much that would be?

My current ISP gives me a cap of 330Gb, and I know that it's total hogwash- if all their customers downloaded that, they'd go bust/network would melt. So why the heck are they telling me I can DL that much? Why not be fair, and say I can have 50Gb for £30 (or whatever is a realistic price)? It's the one-upmanship by ISPs marketing departments that get people confused.


Don't get me started on BT, if their new logos that cost millions to develop are supposed to reflect their move into the data industry rather than strictly voice, why aren't they investing in the infrastructure? With my limited knowledge, 21Cn seems to be 2 years late and it's not even here yet.
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Yes, you're completely right, if everybody imposed caps then obviously it'd work, there'd be business for all etc. But somebody will always try and push down the costs and entice customers in with offers of unlimited internet.

Yeah, 21CN disappoints me somewhat. It is a huge project with big requirements to meet but it is so much less than it could be.

The only alternative is somebody stumping up £5billion or so and setting up a private company to replicate build a nationwide network to rival BT. Much needed - not likely to happen though.
 
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