I am a subscriber of In2Cable for the past 3-4 months and find their service quite good in Bangalore. However, I find the following disadvantages with them:
In2Cable requires you to install their client program on the PC using which you will be browsing the Net. You will be required to login using the client program to browse the Net. Otherwise, you traffic will be blocked at their authentication server. Once the user has logged in, this client program keeps sending’heartbeat’ messages every 3 mins or so. If you forget to logout out of In2Cable and shutdown your PC, In2Cable authentication server stops receiving the heartbeat messages from your PC and automatically logs you out. This is a major problem for those users who connect to their offices or elsewhere using Remote Access VPN. A remote access VPN establishes a secure tunnel between the PC and the remote network. This means that any packet that exits the PC will only go to the remote network and not elsewhere. If you browse the Net after establishing a VPN tunnel, the traffic will actually be going thro’ the remote network and to the target webservers. However, the encrypted packets will be traversing the ISP network to reach the remote network. Once the VPN tunnel is established, the heartbeat message first goes to the remote network and then is sent to In2Cable authentication server. Since the heartbeat message is coming from a foreign network, the authentication server will discard it. Eventually, authentication server will come to the conclusion that it has not received hearbeat messages from the PC and logs the user out. This stops the traffic between PC and rest of the world. Of course, the VPN tunnel also breaks. Bottomline - A remote access VPN tunnel will only last for about 15 mins before it breaks. User has to go thro’ the whole process of login again to get connected. Hence, no subscriber of In2Cable who is in the flat-rate(a.k.a’authenticated’) pool can use remote access VPN. This is a serious problem since lots of users use remote access VPN to connect to their corporates(atleast in Bangalore, given the high concentration of hi-tech companies). More and more companies that currently have dial-up based remote-access are moving on to VPN-based remote access solutions since they are cheaper. In this situation, In2Cable has a serious limitation.
The heartbeat messages are sent every 3 mins. Please note that a set of subscribers will be sharing bandwidth in a cable connection. If one subscriber is uploading data, another belonging to the same set, cannot. Hence, all the cable modems have to compete amongst themselves to get a free slot to upload data. In addition to user traffic, the heartbeat messages are also adding to the competition. This reduces the effective bandwidth that the subscriber gets. This situation turns worse during peak-hours. In2Cable can use a better mechanism to handle subscriber-side failures. They should detect lack of activity from a subscriber and log him/her out instead of relying on an active heartbeat mechanism. The lack of activity from a subscriber can be detected when no packets are getting generated from the subscriber’s PC.
thanks,
Ganesh.