Telecommuters Pay Extra for Cable VPNs

Planning on supporting full-time teleworkers or casual telecommuters with a secure virtual private network over cable broadband service? Think again.

Two of the major cable companies, Comcast and Cox Communications, have boilerplate language buried in their residential service agreements that expressly forbids the use of a VPN over a residential broadband cable hookup.

Two other major cable companies, AT&T Broadband and AOL Time Warner, as well as Cablevision Systems, which serves 3 million subscribers in suburban New York, all say they allow the use of VPNs by residential subscribers but they won't provide user support.

CIOs want to provide remote workers with VPNs to ensure secure connections that will protect corporate data and applications. VPNs provide remote workers with a protected tunnel to corporate servers through the wide-open Internet, guarding data against penetration by hackers.

Higher Charges

Cox views even casual use of a VPN by a part-time telecommuter as a "business class" service that must be provisioned through the company's At Work broadband offering and not its At Home service offered to home users, according to Bobby Amirshahi, director of communications for Cox Business Services in Atlanta. Amirshahi said typical At Work charges for a teleworker with a VPN connection run between $75 and $100 per month, compared with $35 per month for residential high-speed cable broadband service.

Amirshahi said that while Cox doesn't "actively scan" its network to detect the ports used by VPN clients, it does scan the network for excessive bandwidth usage.

Jennie Moyer, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia-based Comcast, said her company "does not support VPN residential services," adding that teleworkers or their companies can purchase Comcast Pro service, which supports secure VPNs, at a cost of $95 per month, compared with $40 per month for the residential broadband service.

Sarah Eder, a spokesperson for Englewood, Colorado-based AT&T Broadband, said that while her company doesn't ban the use of VPNs, it doesn't provide help desk support for VPN users. She said AT&T intends to introduce its own business-grade service once the company completes the transition of its broadband service to its own network from bankrupt @Home's Excite@Home service. At that time, AT&T Broadband will offer help desk support for VPN users on a business-grade network.

Easy Income?

Dan Paton, information services adviser at Oakwood Healthcare in Dearborn, Michigan, which is in the process of rolling out remote access to all the physicians who work at Oakwood's hospital, said he is well aware of cable company policies on VPNs and "will go with the business grade service" because of the importance of remote access to the physicians.

Analysts view the cable companies' VPN policies as unnecessary and as a way to milk more money from corporate users. June Langhoff, a telecommunications consultant in Pacifica, California, said cable companies that force teleworkers to sign up for higher-priced business class service "are ripping off their customers."

John Girard, an analyst at Gartner, said the VPN policies indicate that cable companies, which have made a multibillion-dollar push into broadband over the past five years, "don't understand much more than delivering entertainment into the home."

Girard said cable business-class service "is not any better than residential, yet they charge you more." He added that cable companies probably fear that a large number of teleworkers hooked up to any one cable system could use an excessive amount of bandwidth. But that concern is misplaced, he said. "They should be more worried about kids coming home from school and downloading movies or music," he added, noting that those activities use more bandwidth than corporate applications running over a VPN.

VPNs are "no problem" to cable companies to manage or operate, Girard said, but their VPN policies could be an impediment to the growth of cable broadband.