Impelse,

not sure what the situation is in the States but I have read the t&c's for several ISPs when trying to figure out which provider to go for. In all cases I put a quick call/email into the support desk to query their AUP and explained my profession/hobby. In all cases they agreed that what I wanted to be doing would be acceptable, especially as I had made them aware in advance, and in several cases was told that they didn't implement all of the monitoring suggested by the contract/AUP, it was just there to cover them if they decided to do more in the future.

From my experience, if you talk to the providers and have an open discussion up front you shouldn't have a problem. Although they may try to sell you a business package over your standard residential. Of course this process could also easily be abused, so your mileage may vary once they receive complaints that you are doing 'naughty' things...

Like Andrew and Ketchup said, it depends on the provider. Some of them, if you call them may tell you you'll have to to have a business account or static ip address.

When I had Wide Open West (WOW), I could do pretty much anything. That included running Nmap on the external IP address of my external facing servers at work.

I currently have AT&T, and have to use their Residential Gateway. When ever I try running Nmap from home now it fails, and the Residential Gateway locks everything down, (including the tv) wanting to put my laptop into the DMZ like area with no ports blocked.

I had to call and get smpt open (which you need a static ip for, and I have), because they block traffic going to port 25 from your box. It made trying to trouble shoot work's email servers a real pain. I couldn't telnet to port 25 to see if it was an open relay, or if the servers were taking requests from the internet for regular mail.

The down side, even if you call and they say it can be done, you might have problems getting it done. Like my static IP address with AT&T. No one knew how to set it up for a u-verse residential customer.

Good point, Bill. You want to do a Business Account for a couple reasons. First of all, business accounts get faster support (generally speaking as everyone has stories of woe dealing with any type of support). Secondly, businesses are expected and usually want to handle their own networks including security and the services they want to make available. Therefore ISPs usually have much less and possibly no restrictions. It's just a straight connection to the network. Again, there are exceptions to every rule. On the residential side, the thinking is that homes have inexperienced users who don't normally care about security, so they need the help whether they want it or not.

Don

PS - Bill, I've done Comcast Business in homes before. Strange that you couldn't. Wonder if it's a regional thing. On a side note, most ISPs now offer Static IPs with both Res and Bus accts. You just have to ask for it. Some of the sales reps don't know what it is or if it is available, so you may have to kindly inform them.

I told them that sometimes I do some security test and they told me that they are not blocking anything, I will see, otherwise I will need to upgrade to the business account.