Comment by dannyobrien

19 days ago

What would be the obvious reasons? (I'm not being flippant here -- I'm genuinely interested in what arguments people have to not allow servers on that network)

11 comments

dannyobrien

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fc417fc802  19 days ago

High concentration of technically inept users with hardware that no longer receives security updates and has plenty of well known easily exploitable vulnerabilities. Which naturally is used to run banking apps and travels with users close to 24/7 while tracking their location.

From a business perspective you'd want to charge extra. Just because you can, but also because you want to discourage excess bandwidth use. The internet APs the carriers sell get deprioritized relative to phones when necessary and the fine print generally forbids hosting any services (in noticeably stronger language than the wired ISPs I've had).

  • vladvasiliu  19 days ago

    > From a business perspective you'd want to charge extra. Just because you can, but also because you want to discourage excess bandwidth use

    Isn't that already the case with limited plans?

    For example, mine has 40 GBs and I'm pretty sure it counts both upload and download, because I generally consume very little, except for one week when I was on holiday with no other internet access and wanted to upload my pictures to my home server and didn't otherwise use the phone more than usual.

lunar_rover  19 days ago

The most common use case for mobile data servers is probably pwned cheap/old phones forming DDoS swarms. Pure P2P over internet is very rare on mobile, no sense not blocking ingress from the perspective of ISPs.

  • wongarsu  19 days ago

    However for that having the phone's IP not reachable has at best marginal benefits. The DDoS itself is an outgoing connection, and for command and control having the compromised phone periodically fetch instructions from a server is simpler to implement than the phone offering a port where it is reachable to receive instructions

  • Denatonium  19 days ago

    I kind of doubt this, as the rapidly changing nature of mobile IP addresses would mean that a periodic outbound connection would still be necessary to keep the attack up-to-date on the compromised devices current IP address. At that point, you may as well have the compromised device periodically poll an attacker-controlled server for instructions rather than jump through a bunch of hoops by getting things to work over inbound connections.

vel0city  19 days ago

I think it should vary based on the type of service being provided. Truly mobile service, I think it can make sense to not allow servers. If its being sold as a home internet solution (a more fixed kind of plan), I think it should allow servers to at least some level of hosting services.

The main difference is there's usually limited airtime capacity for clients, especially highly mobile ones. A server could easily hog quite a bit of the airtime on the network serving traffic to people not even in the area, squeezing out the usefulness of the network for all the other highly mobile people in the area. This person moves around, pretty much doing the equivalent of swinging a wrecking ball to the network performance everywhere they go.

When its being sold as a fixed endpoint though, capacity plans can be more targeted to properly support this kind of client. They're staying put, so its easier to target that particular spot for more capacity.

IncRnd  19 days ago

The phone providers oversell bandwidth. They also limit the use of already purchased bandwidth when it gets legitimately used.

Similar to many industries, their business model is selling monthly usage, while simultaneously restricting the actual usage. They are not in the business of being an ISP for people running software on their phones.