I have been reading
the small print concerning the
local long-range wireless network. (LR-WLAN ?)
Amazingly I read that "SSH clients cannot be used on the network without permission."
Used by whom? I’m pretty sure that that isn’t true; I bet an SSH client can be used without permission, because if I were a user I could just fire up an SSH client and go for it.
It doesn’t say whether or not such permission would be granted. How many times does someone have to ask for such permission, and what actions, scenarios or periods might such a permission cover. Perhaps it is a clumsy mistaken wording, and they are trying to say that by default TCP port 22 is blocked, for some reason - and they are assuming that you are using that particular well-known port for SSH, but maybe what they are trying to say is that you have to ask for someone to unblock it for you?
Why has someone got it in for SSH? If someone feels threatened because they won’t be able to snoop on users’ traffic then the same problem applies to TLS, SSL, PGP, S/MIME, IP/SEC and VPNs forty other encryption systems. If the user tunnels all traffic through an encrypted VPN then Skyenet just won’t be able to spy on anything, never mind SSH.
The page goes to great lengths telling you that it isn’t telling you anything. I can’t even see any service description. Where’s the detailed description of the exact nature of the services provided ? ("what am I getting for my money") And I don’t see quantitative performance guarantees; IPv6? How many IPv4 addresses? It seems to go to great lengths to emphasise the pig-in-a-poke nature of the thing: You are not going to know what you are going to get and we certainly are not going to tell you. No details of filtering of IP protocols or TCP and UDP ports, no details on wider internet censorship / blocking - never mind IPv6 - so no idea of how full a service it is in terms of access to the internet. I can’t see anything about firewalling; whether or not inbound access from the wider internet to the user’s IPs is blocked by stateful firewalling, and whether or not that is something that the user can sort out.
I realise that this dubious ‘service’ might be useful. One can assume that it shifts some kinds of IPv4 packets at some kind of unknown speed, with an unknown rate of packet loss. Because these performance indicators are unknown, and there’s no guarantee on uptime or time-to-fix as well as the forty other pig-in-a-poke factors, it could never be used as a regular access method. The packet loss might completely screw up everything else if the use of this LR-WLAN were simultaneously combined with other access methods in the wrong fashion, and such packet loss might wreck overall reliability if LR-WLAN were bonded in with ECMPR.
I can’t help thinking that done right it could be an enhancement. It surely must have potential as a failover technology. I’m using 3G for this now but it’s very slow, but who cares, you can’t have everything, and may be able to get a 4G USB NIC going properly. The problem at the moment is the 4G USB NICs themselves - I have not got access to one that acts as a straight modem although it may be possible to get hold of a suitable model made by ZTE, unclear to me at the moment, or might be able to get help from AA with other good models at some point. The costs per byte are huge too if we do get an outage, but normally costs are spectacularly low per month without failures. Given the horrible (=undefined) nature of the Skyenet service, its only advantages are speed and low cost in an outage, set against high standby cost if it’s not being used, plus a lot of hassle trying to work around its unsuitable presentation - it would need AA L2TP during failover to make it usable, which would make it even more expensive.
One final truly crazy thought though - could the LR-WLAN give an additional benefit besides being a failover mechanism? What about using it for upstream only ? I am desperate for more upstream throughput. Could this be set up so that things won’t be vulnerable to any possible upstream packet loss in the LR-WLAN? (Suggestion: no.) The Skynet service gives no meaningful performance figures but hints that with no users you could get 20Mpbs downstream, it’s so lazy that it doesn’t even differentiate between upstream and downstream. However, as best I can guess about the nature of the network, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is symmetrical upstream vs downstream, and with its user community of home users and soho users, the upstream will likely be very lightly loaded anyway. So perhaps the figures of 8Mbps and 20Mbps which are quoted as
most-optimistic figures apply to
upstream as well as downstream. If I could get 8Mbps upstream bonded with my existing 1.4Mps upstream then that would be fantastic. There would be the usual problems with reduced MTU, because I would need to use AA’s L2TP service to tunnel through SkyNet. A lot of hassle and two additional per-month costs.