VPN Remote Access most broadband cable services want fees for it's use, but do you get more for the money
Planning on supporting
full-time teleworkers or casual telecommuters with a secure VPN remote access
over cable broadband service? Think again. Two of the major cable companies,
Comcast and Cox Communications, have boilerplate language buried in their residential
service agreements that expressly forbids the use of a VPN remote access over
a residential broadband cable hookup.
Two other
major cable companies, AT&T Broadband and AOL Time Warner, as well as Cablevision
Systems, which serves 3 million subscribers in suburban New York, all say they
allow the use of VPN remote access by residential subscribers but they won't
provide user support.
Cox views even casual use of a VPN remote access by a part time telecommuter
as a "business class" service that must be provisioned through the
company's At Work broadband offering and not its At Home service offered to
home users.
Dan Paton, information services adviser at Oakwood Healthcare in Dearborn, Michigan, which is in the process of rolling out VPN remote access to all the physicians who work at Oakwood's hospital, said he is well aware of broadband cable company policies on Virtual Private Networks and "will go with the business grade service" because of the importance of remote access to the physicians.
John Girard, an analyst at Gartner, said the VPN remote access policies indicate that cable companies, which have made a multibillion dollar push into broadband over the past five years, "don't understand much more than delivering entertainment into the home."
VPN remote access is "no problem" to cable companies to manage or operate, Girard said, but their policies could be an impediment to the growth of cable broadband.