Tim wrote:
On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 04:17 -0500, Rick Sewill wrote:
In the case of the cable companies, I believe they treat the cable like
it is a broadcast interface. I believe they ARP for that IP address to
get the MAC address for that machine. I get these ARP requests because
they are broadcast to me and to everyone with whom I share the cable.
Yes, but it tends to be a group of people on one cable (perhaps everyone
on one street, or a few streets), not every customer for the ISP is in
that group. *Part* of the path between you and the ISP is shared, you
don't all have an individual, isolated, connections.
I was on Cable for a few years and I was a good friend with that old
system manager. Cable companies only segment when they need to and when
demand pushes it. Our local cable company had two segments for the
whole city. ~8,000 customers.
It was related to cost and the need to supply reliable service. He
wanted to segment further but it would have required a major change and
management wouldn't go for it. Needless, he left soon after because he
knew it was going to become a major headache.
At the time, there was no port blocking on the cable routers so opening
up a network browser found a large amount of shared computers available
on the network. What fun someone could have had. :)
When I moved to DSL from cable, I was shocked at how the speed differed
between the two during the heavy evening usage. I could access the
cable companies local servers faster through DSL than with the Cable
modem. Ouch.
--
Due to the move to M$ Exchange Server,
anything that is a priority, please phone.
Robin Laing
