how-to block ads
|
|
Share Topic
 |
 |
|
 pflogBueller? Bueller?Premium,MVM
join:2001-09-01
El Dorado Hills, CA
kudos:3 | reply to DSL Oberst
Re: wtf? comcast asked us not to use VPN said by DSL Oberst:The official reason was a) residential accounts had no guaranteed uptime - a person could be down weeks and that would be TOS-compliant, b) said VPN could thus be down for weeks (as in the case of a reprovisioning the phone line to a house) and c) that means that Earthlink could be held legally liable for all business losses incurred by not having VPN available on the account. Thus, Earthlink only supported VPN connections on business accounts, which had a guaranteed uptime of 98%. I can understand that, but since it's not a guaranteed service, isn't this already understood? That is, the person is incurring the risk of using a residential internet connection to work from home and therefore if it does down, they have to live with it or get business service.
Why make it a policy to only allow it for business service? If the user wants to save $50/mo and be able to login to work (let's assume for the sake of argument that said person does not work from home daily, but uses it maybe 10 hours a week total to get some extra work done), why shouldn't they be able to assume that risk?
It's pretty clear from the TOS that, in general, the service has no guaranteed uptime. Which is true for all residential connections. Why aren't other ISPs preventing VPN, if it's simple a way to cover their butt? Their butt is already covered as far as I'm concerned, since it's not a guaranteed service with any guarantee of uptime.
--
"Hey honey! Do you think KFC's still open?" | |
| I can understand that, but since it's not a guaranteed service, isn't this already understood? That is, the person is incurring the risk of using a residential internet connection to work from home and therefore if it does down, they have to live with it or get business service. You'd like to think so, but many...clients didn't see that way. Since I dealt primarily with ADSL escalations for the majority of my time there, I got to talk with a number of clients with complaints in regard to VPN and outages of one sort or another. Example in short form:
- Line got cut by utility
- Telco reconnects line, ADSL is gone, needs reprovisioning.
- Guy calls up, gets reprov, learns of 2-3 week timeframe through Covad, screams bloody murder. Starts talking about how he relys on VPN for business and ZOMG HE'S GOING TO SUE FOR BUSINESS LOSSES.
- I advise TOS.
- Guy doesn't care about TOS, he uses it for business so for him it's a business account, ZOMG SUE!
- Circle. Repeat. 1 hour passes.
- Guy hangs up, files suit, maybe doesn't file suit.
- If suit filed, Earthlink legal beagles present evidence that TOS denies suit, ask for summary judgement, case gets tossed out.
I got maybe 3-7 calls like that a week. That's out of the thousands of disconnects/installs/reprovisions/relocations we were doing. The policy involving business usage was essentially created to isolate the possibility of loss via the OMG SUE, uh, rear-end chapeaus.
Why aren't other ISPs preventing VPN, if it's simple a way to cover their butt? As far as I am aware, ALL ISPs have this boilerplate somewhere in their TOS. However, most of the time, they don't care. When someone (who wasn't screaming their damnfool head off) told me they used it for business, I would say "I didn't hear that, sir/ma'am."
If they got belligerent and demanded that we support business usage - and there would be people calling in and demanding stridently that TS troubleshoot their VPN connection - we had authority to cancel the account immediately, dump their email, and disconnect them. This was to protect the company from liability, nothing more. I can remember twice in four years that I actually felt it necessary to do that. *shrug*
Oh, and then there is the "'Always On' internet means GUARANTEED!!! SUE!!!" argument. Ha, that was always one for chuckles. 
There you have it. I don't believe either side is right, but that's how it worked at ELNK. Notes I compared with reps from other companies never said different there either. | | |
|
|
