SV: CPE Residential IPv6 Security Poll

[Benedikt Stockebrand]

Hi Ted and list,

Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> writes:

> 1) You got the money, tell your vendors to either do what you want
> (put IPv6 UPnP in CPEs they sell you) or you are going to kick their
> ass. It's your money! [...]

that only works if you're big enough for that.  If you're a small local
ISP (and I've done the odd training/consulting job with these) this is
frequently not an option.

Plus, you may as an ISP be unable to dictate your customers what CPE to
use.  We've recently had a law introduced here (Germany) aimed to
prevent ISPs from forcing their CPEs down people's throats.

And finally, especially in a market which is largely price driven,
you're sometimes bound to buy the cheapest CPEs on the market.  And
these then turn out to be so cheap because they have so little resources
that UPnP can't be implemented in them.

> 2) It's not your problem if Ma & Pa Kettle find a wannabe power
> user.

That's too simple.  As soon as they call your first level support, then
it becomes your problem if only because you need to pay your first level
supporters.

> If you don't like being bad-mouthed by wannabe power users on the
> online forums then get your ass on the online forums and start
> engaging.

Definitely.  But again, that involves paying people for doing so.

> Refute those "need bigger antennas" posts with logic and reason.

Hmm, that can actually be kind of tricky.  If your organization has a
reputation of talking your way out of the problems you have, this will
be difficult at best.

There's a fairly large SIP operator (sipgate) here in Germany who for
quite some time has told people that their service not working over
DS-Lite was entirely a problem between the customer and their ISP,
giving technical reasons you can quite likely figure out yourself.  With
DS-Lite gaining more and more of a foothold here---and at least one
major ISP slipstreaming that on existing lines without notifying the
customers---technical explanations are exactly not what to tell people
whose phones suddenly stopped working.

Once you screw your customer relation up with this sort of stunt it
takes a lot of time (and marketing) to fix that up again.


Cheers,

    Benedikt

-- 
Benedikt Stockebrand,                   Stepladder IT Training+Consulting
Dipl.-Inform.                           http://www.stepladder-it.com/

          Business Grade IPv6 --- Consulting, Training, Projects

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