Are you a Cable TV Company?

If you are a Cable TV Company getting into Internet Services, then you need our products even more than the regular ISPs do. How will you ever network millions upon millions of machines around the country using registered addresses? It's going to be nearly impossible! If only you could use the reserved RFC 1597 Addresses, within your world, and then use registered addresses only where you must! Guess what... That's where we can help!

Networking a City

Rather than using registered addresses for each of your customers, chop a metropolitan area into manageable subnets and give each of them one of the RFC 1597 networks (or use the RFC 1597 Class A and subnet). You may use a standard router to interconnect the area subnets if you wish them to be able to speak to each other. Then use our NAT boxes to connect these to the rest of the Internet.

Networking a Customer

Not all of your customers have just one computer. In fact, most of them will have more than one before long. To accomodate these customers, you may provide them a NAT for in their home or office, to allow all of their computers to share your services. And, because of the NAT functionality, they would do that with just one of your IP Addresses. A big savings to you and a further business opportunity.

Build your own NATs

To make it easy and inexpensive for you, we can license the software to you and help you build the boxes. Our products are basically software that we load into a Pentium-based PC. We use the wonderful 3COM Network Interface Controllers, and a hardware watchdog controller card from B&B Electronics. The current version of the software requires a mere 4 MB of RAM, but the next version (for WinNT or Win95) will require 16MB. All models need a hard disk of at least 500 MB. It's hard to find anything smaller! If you have pedestal-mounted embedded Intel-based systems capable of running DOS, we can probably port to those. The hard disk is only required if local logging and Web page service is required. For a small area, a 486 is adequate.

The platform you use is up to you and to your customer, if you're installing them in a customer site. We'll license the software to you on a per-customer basis, on a sliding scale. We'll provide you bug fixes and enhancements that you may give to your customers.

The Next Version!

Our next version will be very exciting! It will be a software-only version, running on Windows 95 or Windows NT. It will use the standard Microsoft stacks. It will have a full 32-bit environment to run in, and so will be much more capable. The biggest benefit to a very small customer, is the elimination of the need for a dedicated PC platform for the NAT. This will appeal to your smaller users, even families! It will also have encrypted tunnel options, using RC4 stream cypher from RSA Security.

Internet Access Control

The next version will implement a variety of mechanisms to limit the users' access to the Internet. The traditional, but flawed, "Good Host, Bad Host" facility will supported, as will various levels of control based on time of day and nature of user. Families and small business will appreciate this addition.

Benefits to YOU!

There are a bunch of direct benefits to you when you use our NATs. Among these are:

You will be able to use RFC 1597 Addresses throughout most of your network,
You give your customer a single IP Address, rather than a whole Class C,
You can get usage statistics from the NAT via the syslog service, to help you monitor and plan your network,
You might not need to change the IP Addresses at a site that already has some IP in use,
Opportunities for additional ongoing paid services.

A Single IP Address

Did the NIC give you all the addresses that you think you'll ever need? Probably not! The NAT translates the IP Address at the customer site to the IP Address that you assign them from your pool. The customer may have one or hundreds of computers, but to you and the rest of the Internet, they all use the single address you assigned them. This lets you stretch your assigned addresses far beyond what was previously possible.

Use Existing IP Addresses

A customer that already has some IP in use, and who may or may not have registered addresses, may keep their addresses, since they'll never be seen on the outside. The NAT hides their addresses completely. You should encourage them to use the "reuseable" network addresses from RFC 1597 when you can.

Ongoing Service Opportunities

Since the NAT acts like an Internet Firewall, you can provide firewall monitoring and configuration services. Not all customers have the skill and experience that you do, and will be happy for you to look after this important aspect.

You may contract to update the "Good Host, Bad Host" access control tables within the customer NAT, using information that you gather from employees, customers and other suppliers of this information.

How Does It Work?

We use a greatly enhanced version of RFC 1631 Network Address Translation. Check out the techie details if you wish.

Limitations of the Current Version

The current version is limited in memory capability, and therefore must be used on fairly low volume networks. Packet forwarding rates cannot exceed 100 packets per second in the current version. We were offering a version with integral T1 card, but were unable to handle the typical T1 mix of data.

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