What NTL know....

[quadplay]

From the Internet Usage Residential Terms & Conditions:

20. Use of the Network (Broadband services)

The residential broadband internet service ("Broadband Services") is designed for connection to a single PC. If you connect more than one PC at any one time to the Broadband Service you agree that this shall be entirely at your own risk. ntl will not support your PC's, the network used, or their configuration and technical support shall remain limited to your Internet connection only.

You must not connect more than three (3) PC's to the Broadband Services at any one time.

You are permitted to use routers, and the connection of a dedicated hardware router or firewall shall not be considered a PC for the purposes of this section.

In connecting to the Broadband Service, you must only use a PC you own or lease, and you must not attempt to connect your PC to the Broadband Services from outside your home . This includes the use of wireless or non-wireless networking technology to connect your PC or any other PC to your Broadband Services from outside your home (other than your own garden) or the connection of your PC to anyone else's Broadband Services.

21. Gaming Consoles

You may only connect XBox gaming consoles to the NTL network using a designated Xbox compatible broadband access product.

Users may only connect PlayStation 2 gaming consoles to the ntl network using a designated PlayStation 2 compatible broadband access product.

My emboldening...

Originally Posted by Tezcatlipoca

Well, I don't think the way the AUP is written is particularly clear-cut. <snip>..

I completely agree with you Tez, the AUP is very poorly written and I doubt it would stand up in court. I was really trying to warn Nutty that ntl don't see it that way and to be careful who he tells about his set up.

[Tezcatlipoca]

Originally Posted by towny

I completely agree with you Tez, the AUP is very poorly written and I doubt it would stand up in court. I was really trying to warn Nutty that ntl don't see it that way and to be careful who he tells about his set up.

LOL, yeah, v badly written.

Wasn't taking issue with your warning or anything you said, Towny - just wanted to point out my take on the AUP

[slimshady]

They will be able to find out how many PC you've got behind...If you were on the Business 5 IP Static Service but thats about it!!! and even then u dont know if those PC's are running NAT.

[Chris W]

I am not very sure on this... but if they were to inspect the packets that were coming from your network, would they not be able to see the mac address of the source machine, and therefore be able to see if they were picking up 4/5/6 different mac addresses?

don't know much about it myself, but i have heard this... could someone more techy confirm it for me please!!!

[rdhw]

Originally Posted by monkeybreath

if they were to inspect the packets that were coming from your network, would they not be able to see the mac address of the source machine, and therefore be able to see if they were picking up 4/5/6 different mac addresses?

The MAC address that NTL sees is the MAC address of the WAN port of your router, which will be the same for all PCs connected behind the router.

However, it is usually possible to figure out which customer is using a router by the characterisitics of the DHCP requests that the router makes. Plus, if you don't clone the MAC address of the WAN port of the router, each default MAC address identifies its manufacturer, so you can see which router is a Linksys, which a Netgear, which a D-link, and so on.

But is still isn't very easy for an ISP to tell exactly how many PCs are behind a router.

[Matth]

I forget where I read it, but a rather forensic process was described, that could make strong assumptions about the number of systems behind a router, but it required tight monitoring. If you spoof the router's mac address, then unless they are going to router-check everyone, then they don't even know where to start looking!

What's the point of the 3 machine limit anyway? - So I can't invite 3 mates to hook their machines up, and team-frag some other guys over the net.

Since the standard consumer broadband router normally has FOUR ports, that would be a more understandable limit, since you would be hooking some extra hardware up to support more.

[asdf]

I think the idea was to "scare" people into not hooking up lots of machines and then consuming more (most likely if there are four average users as opposed to one average user) bandwidth.