Consumer Internet Access restrictions

[phillipsjk]

Hello,

I am weird: I assume that those legalese contracts are written in good faith, even if they may not be enforceable.

Anyway, the ISP my family uses has a clause that states:

26.d No Servers. You are not permitted to operate an e-mail, web, news or other similar server for any purpose through any Service , except as may be specified by UNISERVE from time to time in its sole discretion.

I sent a low-priority email asking if they would grant an exemption for IPv6: at least until they offer a competing service. It is a low priority because I doubt my Router Software is able to forward protocol 41 (somebody had trouble with protocol 47). I am debating about whether it is possible to have an IPv6-aware floppy-based router (I have more powerful replacement hardware available).

Anyway, to limit the damage of a potential account cut-off, I am considering going with the Local Cable company's "Point of Sale Connect" package. Even though the bandwidth is low, I can only upload at a 25% duty-cycle (neglecting download) to stay under thier 10GB/Month cap. While I don't think that would be a problem, I have fantasies of posting something interesting enough to get a million hits/day on my web-site. If the (theoretical) IPv6 Mirror gets 1/1000th of that, I may have to throttle the bandwidth.

There are two problems I forsee:

The residential Shaw Services are designed for personal Internet use. You may not use the residential Shaw Services for commercial purposes. You may not run a server in connection with the Shaw Services nor may you provide network services to others via the Shaw Services. Examples of prohibited servers and services include, but are not limited to, mail, http, ftp, irc, dhcp servers, and multi-user interactive forums. Some business services may be exempt from these limitations.

If we assume only services offering a "static" IP address are exempt, they want me to spend ~$170/month, $300 if I want  "burstable" upload bandwidth.
For that price, I can get a colocated server with a fat pipe and tunnel from there.
Edit: Shaw's representative pointed out I can "upgrade" the SOHO package to use a static IP as well for ~$95/month.

The second problem is that the  available downstream bandwidth far exceeds the upstream bandwidth, but it still counts towards your bandwidth allocation. Is Hurricane Electric able to do bandwidth shaping at their end of the tunnel? Or should I just assume that Shaw's DPI  provider will detect any DDOS attempt?

Another thing I am not sure about: how explicitly should I tell Shaw I want to use the connection to host IPv6 webservers? If my site becomes popular, they will find out anyway. If it is not, the tunnel will simply be used for personal IPv6 "web-browsing" traffic. Edit: Sent Shaw a "pre-sales" question about this. Response was use SOHO package with "static IP" rental.

Having read the forum posts, many participants are using residential Internet as well. Is it just staying below the radar? For the record, I don't really think "consumer" Internet access should be properly called "Internet access" unless you are allowed to host servers. IP is a peer-to-peer protocol. That is true no matter how much they demonize the Bittorrent (or IRC) protocols.

Edit There is a local Wireless Internet Provider where I live. Not sure how they would react to consumer web-hosting (below the bandwidth cap). I would prefer to use the wires going to my house already :) I am probably out of their coverage area anyway. Edit: I contacted them. Serge ("person in charge") suggested the business 1.5Mbps package ~$60/month, 15 GB cap. They are not targeting consumers in the city with their services (Mainly Commercial and apartment buildings).

Another thing I am a little concerned about: HE is a US company. What happens if I want to host something illegal in the US, but (currently) legal in Canada (like the dCSS program for decoding DVDs, not to be confused with the W3C program for striping Style Sheets from HTML files)? I think I am closer to the Seattle tunnel than Toronto.