ISPs' willingness to take action

Mon Oct 27 13:34:51 UTC 2003

One significant contributing factor to the lack of care or clue by mid and 
large size ISPs is the level 1 helldesk.  I do not intend to insult anybody 
who is doing level 1 support, but you are not going to find people with 
serious network engineering expertise for $12/hour (or when outsourcing 
tech support for $5/hour to India).

Far too many layer 1 people have to deal with clueless users who call in 
saying "Your mail server is haxxxing my firewall!".  How do you seperate 
the legitimate abuse complaints from the chaff?  That said, if somebody has 
a fast connection, hand-holding them through the process of using Windows 
Update by phone isn't terribly difficult.

I think one of the smartest things a DSL/Cable ISP could do is negotiate a 
bulk license purchase with an anti-virus software vendor such as Kaspersky 
(makers of AVP), which can provide licenses for as little as $10 each in 
bulk.  Is $10 per customer per year too much to pay for comprehensive 
auto-updating virus-scanning of client PCs?

>1) Summarily fencing/sandboxing/disconnecting clients sending high volumes
>of spam, virii, etc.  You might politely contact your commercial/static
>clients first, but anyone connecting a "bare" PC on a broadband circuit is
>too stupid to deserve coddling.  The great majority of your clients would
>thank you profusely.
>
>So far as I can see, detection of serious abusers should pretty
>straightforward.  It wouldn't require any pretense at spam or virus
>filtering, per se; just pick off the clients that are flagrant sources of
>the plague of the month.