cypherstream
Looking forward to the future of things.
Premium,MVM
join:2004-12-02
Reading, PA
clubs:
1 edit | I actually successfully uncapped a few years ago when I was young and stupid. It worked for a bit until greed caught up to me. It was on Prolog cable modem service over Service Electric Cablevision. They had 2 tiers at the time, a 600/190kbps, and a 800/800kbps. I rented a SurfBoard 4100 and it was so easy to bump my modem from the 600/190k service to the 800/800kbps. I was able to run the 800k service for at least a month, but then one night the power went out which reset it to 600k service. Instead of just putting it back to 800k, I uncapped it to 2.5M/1.5M (way fast at the time). I at least wanted 2MB down because heck, Suscom was doing it when I was at College! Well that only lasted one night. Woke up the next morning to a blinking modem (won't get an IP). Called SECV and they had no idea. They had me check diags, reboot it. So they said "We'll get back to you". Later on they called and said "Prolog suspended your account due to abuse". I called Prolog and there was no way out of it. I used an excuse that we had a storm the night before (we did), and there must of been a surge to mess up the modem. No dice. He said there's no way a surge could put strange caps in the upstream/downstream settings. He said how they have SNMP traps that when your modem goes over a certain threshold it sets off an alarm. He said they used to have a serious problem with uncapping, so they installed this system to monitor for it. Needless to say, I could of stayed at the 800k tier, since that was the maximum speed at the time, it wouldn't cause any SNMP alerts (hence running it for about a month). Anyway the result was suspended modem service for 6 months. I had to return the modem to the office since it was rented. A few months later, I went back to College in Williamsport, PA, so it was no big deal, just a summer without highspeed. Well I learned something from the whole thing! Not only the inconvenience of loosing service, and the treat of loosing service for my lifetime if done again, but the embarrassment of telling my Dad. He was angry since the bill was in his name, and it was his house. He also found my 2600 magazines (the hacker quarterly) and I had to listen to countless lectures. He thought I was into real bad stuff. I'll never tamper with anything like that anymore, that's for sure! ISP's do the right thing by suspending accounts. Its a quick sure fire way to learn. |
