4 ms·

I think that's the crux here. "But I need to run an open Tor proxy!" is going to get some weird looks, especially on residential connections.

xxpor 5y ago
An ISP is selling me fiber to transmit bits and an IP address to talk to the rest of the world. How many TCP connections I'm establishing is exactly none of their business unless they start receiving abuse reports (or run CGNAT, but that's not the issue here). Whoever thought a *stateful ONT* was a good idea should be shot out of a canon. Just wait until the connection timers in the ONT don't match your firewall. Then you'll have real fun.
- mise_en_place 5y ago
  What a wild take. I was going to start a WISP but realized early on I would get potential customers like this. Let’s be real, you’re being cheap and don’t want to shell out extra cash per month for a business line or colocation.
  - ikiris 5y ago
    It is indeed better that you didn't start a WISP with this additude. There's enough bad ones out there as it is.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    Why should he need a business line? He's not using excessive bandwidth. The restriction imposed on him is completely arbitrary.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  The service that you're describing is usually called dedicated internet access or DIA. It is a distinct service from residential ISPs, and a more costly one for good reasons. Residential and business ISPs operate a shared resource on which they must impose limits to avoid impacts on other customers. This is as true of PON as other last-mile technologies. Total ballpark, because it depends plenty on your market, proximity to carrier resources, etc, gigabit symmetric DIA tends to be in the neighborhood of $1000-2000 per month. A lot of the variance comes from the fact that it will be delivered by conventional fiber, not PON, in order to avoid resource contention. So trenching is usually involved in the installation, but the price of that is usually amortized into your 3-year contract.
- bcrl 5y ago
  An ISP (I run one) sells a residential connection to you as a user under a number of assumptions that you are like other residential users. That means that your usage these days is roughly 4 Mbps measured at the 95th percentile (in aggregate). When you run a Tor node you cause the following problems: - your 95th percentile usage is now likely going to be substantially more than 4 Mbps - your usage is likely to be much more constant (less bursty). This breaks statistical multiplexing amongst residential users. For reference, Netflix with HD video streams tends to burst to 25Mbps for a second and is then idle for 4-5 seconds. - your usage is now exposing the ISP to DoS attacks and other interesting (read as expensive) problems caused by running a Tor node. This includes legal costs when dealing with investigations into malicious use of the network by nefarious people trying to hide illegal activities via Tor. Yes, your ISP has to bear the cost for legal issues that arise when its users engage in illegal activity over their internet connections. - your Tor usage is likely to result in the IPs that are used by you to get added to various blacklists. This results in support costs for the ISP when your dynamic IP gets assigned to another user and causes problems for an unrelated. If you really want to do this, colocate a Tor node in a data center. This kind of traffic is perfectly appropriate in commercial circumstances, and the price you pay will reflect the actual cost of the service being delivered. You're not going to cause nearly as much collateral damage with a dedicated internet connection as you will on a residential network. Yes, Tor has its place, and if you're going to run a Tor node, think long and hard about the impact it will have before doing so. Many smaller ISPs are not at a scale where the company can afford to carry the costs needed to support traffic patterns that are generated by Tor. Small ISPs have to be very careful to balance the line between expanding to serve the needs of our customers and breaking even. Legal budgets only become a thing after an ISP has hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. Please, don't do something like this to a small ISP that's trying to help bridge the broadband divide. At the very least, run it by them before doing so.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    These are all problems that are yours, not mine, unless you've put it in a contract. I don't give a poop about your multiplexing oversubscription. That's a business choice. The bet didn't work out. Data caps are a common way to fix it, but those in the contract. Notice at no point did CL ever say you can't run a Tor exit node. Of course, a common clause in these types of contracts is that the provider can just drop you at their leisure. That's also an option. But don't implement this hacky nonsense. My actual day job is writing bandwidth/packet rate/connection count limiters, so I'm well aware of how these things work. Even regardless of the Tor issues, the problem OP is having is related to the quantity of TCP connections, not Tor itself. So the points are irrelevant. He could be connecting to arbitrary HTTP servers and run into the same problem.

xxpor 5y ago

An ISP is selling me fiber to transmit bits and an IP address to talk to the rest of the world. How many TCP connections I'm establishing is exactly none of their business unless they start receiving abuse reports (or run CGNAT, but that's not the issue here). Whoever thought a *stateful ONT* was a good idea should be shot out of a canon. Just wait until the connection timers in the ONT don't match your firewall. Then you'll have real fun.

mise_en_place 5y ago
What a wild take. I was going to start a WISP but realized early on I would get potential customers like this. Let’s be real, you’re being cheap and don’t want to shell out extra cash per month for a business line or colocation.
- ikiris 5y ago
  It is indeed better that you didn't start a WISP with this additude. There's enough bad ones out there as it is.
- jevoten 5y ago
  Why should he need a business line? He's not using excessive bandwidth. The restriction imposed on him is completely arbitrary.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
The service that you're describing is usually called dedicated internet access or DIA. It is a distinct service from residential ISPs, and a more costly one for good reasons. Residential and business ISPs operate a shared resource on which they must impose limits to avoid impacts on other customers. This is as true of PON as other last-mile technologies. Total ballpark, because it depends plenty on your market, proximity to carrier resources, etc, gigabit symmetric DIA tends to be in the neighborhood of $1000-2000 per month. A lot of the variance comes from the fact that it will be delivered by conventional fiber, not PON, in order to avoid resource contention. So trenching is usually involved in the installation, but the price of that is usually amortized into your 3-year contract.
bcrl 5y ago
An ISP (I run one) sells a residential connection to you as a user under a number of assumptions that you are like other residential users. That means that your usage these days is roughly 4 Mbps measured at the 95th percentile (in aggregate). When you run a Tor node you cause the following problems: - your 95th percentile usage is now likely going to be substantially more than 4 Mbps - your usage is likely to be much more constant (less bursty). This breaks statistical multiplexing amongst residential users. For reference, Netflix with HD video streams tends to burst to 25Mbps for a second and is then idle for 4-5 seconds. - your usage is now exposing the ISP to DoS attacks and other interesting (read as expensive) problems caused by running a Tor node. This includes legal costs when dealing with investigations into malicious use of the network by nefarious people trying to hide illegal activities via Tor. Yes, your ISP has to bear the cost for legal issues that arise when its users engage in illegal activity over their internet connections. - your Tor usage is likely to result in the IPs that are used by you to get added to various blacklists. This results in support costs for the ISP when your dynamic IP gets assigned to another user and causes problems for an unrelated. If you really want to do this, colocate a Tor node in a data center. This kind of traffic is perfectly appropriate in commercial circumstances, and the price you pay will reflect the actual cost of the service being delivered. You're not going to cause nearly as much collateral damage with a dedicated internet connection as you will on a residential network. Yes, Tor has its place, and if you're going to run a Tor node, think long and hard about the impact it will have before doing so. Many smaller ISPs are not at a scale where the company can afford to carry the costs needed to support traffic patterns that are generated by Tor. Small ISPs have to be very careful to balance the line between expanding to serve the needs of our customers and breaking even. Legal budgets only become a thing after an ISP has hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. Please, don't do something like this to a small ISP that's trying to help bridge the broadband divide. At the very least, run it by them before doing so.
- xxpor 5y ago
  These are all problems that are yours, not mine, unless you've put it in a contract. I don't give a poop about your multiplexing oversubscription. That's a business choice. The bet didn't work out. Data caps are a common way to fix it, but those in the contract. Notice at no point did CL ever say you can't run a Tor exit node. Of course, a common clause in these types of contracts is that the provider can just drop you at their leisure. That's also an option. But don't implement this hacky nonsense. My actual day job is writing bandwidth/packet rate/connection count limiters, so I'm well aware of how these things work. Even regardless of the Tor issues, the problem OP is having is related to the quantity of TCP connections, not Tor itself. So the points are irrelevant. He could be connecting to arbitrary HTTP servers and run into the same problem.