X-no-Archive:yes
Dave, my provider, recently acquired by AT&T, will not directly support
anyone's home network, and offers to provide home networking service for
$14.95, which to many of us seems like highway robbery for something we
could just do for ourselves. Ironically, on their provided news server, they
also host their own member-only forums (at least, I assume they are
unavailable outside their network), one of which is dedicated to networking!
So, while they will not officially support home networking, they provide a
forum for members to do so. As for this being a bad thing, really, how much
additional bandwidth can one household chew up? Normal use should not bring
down a commercial provider, nor flood my local segment that badly. Still, if
your provider wants to sell some kind of multiple connection subscription,
they could see this as lost revenue, even if the number of customers who are
both willing and able to build their own networks has traditionally been
small (although home networking is now a market segment in its own right).

>  My service contract...
> states "residential DSL service is intended for the connection of a
> single PC..."

Connection at which levels of the OSI model? Hmmm... I think I see a loop
hole!

Supporting what one's customers want to do with their own service beats
ticking off your potential customer base, or your regular customers. Perhaps
these companies who are experienced providing cable and phone services have
learned the hard way that people resent such imposed limitations, and also
realize that all of these companies have or are getting competition. I
expect that most of us do remember when THE phone company wanted to control
how many phones one had in one's home, and cable companies wanted to limit
the number of TVs that were hooked into cable. It is an easy enough thing to
come up with schemes to consume all of one's available bandwidth for hours
on end, just to spite one's own unhelpful ISP. And based on some of the
vitriol I see people post, there are apparently people who are not above
doing so merely out of spite.

In your case, it is probably not a Herculean task to temporarily remove your
firewall device while requesting tech support. I'm just surprised that they
would make a fuss over it. I am mildly curious about how they could even
tell, though.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com