Watching Your Stuff And Port 80

I think I should post about this for the sake of those who might be trying to set up a webcam to monitor their pet/house/belongings/pot of gold/whatever.  Many of these web cameras come with an internal web server and free dynamic dns service. For those who aren’t geek proficient, this means you can access the camera from any computer connected to the internet.  My mother, who is a tech savvy technology administrator for schools, was attempting to set up such a system.  She got so far as to get it to work while on her local network in the house, however the internet part wasn’t working and for awhile she really couldn’t figure out why.

While discussing this on the phone, she reminded me she was using Verizon Fios and I blurted out that the problem could be port 80 and Verizon’s policy of blocking the standard web port.  Sure enough, she tried a random port in the 6000 range and reported success when she got a friend from the outside to test.  Basically, she could access the webcam at instead of just

Verizon’s Consumer Fios plan specifically says on the Features tab of their FAQ page states:

“The consumer offers do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or

Verizon does not actively stop my hosting the server, but they annoy her by making her type in extra numbers at the end of the URL. If you want to host any type of server on port 80, you have to get a Business plan package.  I’d wonder what they’d do if my mother had any troubles with her Fios service, called their support line, and accidentally mentioned she was running a server?

Now to simply think while typing.  “Consumers” as Verizon has defined them, have many valid reasons to run the “type of server” personal.  The web cam my mother installed is useful for a large segment of the population that is not tech savvy that simply needs to watch their stuff.  What portion of that population would understand port number problems?

For most consumers understand the internet connection as a downstream connection for content delivery.  If anything, most consumers only understand the upstream as small transfers like emails, instant messages, forum/blog posts, and uploading to storage providers like Flickr or YouTube.  This limits the marketability of things like home automation and remote personal content access.  Technologies like these might be extremely useful to a huge sector of consumers, but are difficult to set up currently.  Policies like Verizon’s make it more difficult.

There are many solutions to the remote personal content access problem.  The most obvious is to use a third party online storage solution.  This works for things like photos and documents, but for personal collections of videos and music this becomes unwieldy.  Since physical memory is cheaper and easier to use than bandwidth, most people deal with the latter two by iPod and external hard drive like devices.  Home automation and monitoring, however, are currently limited to those knowledgeable enough to negotiate routers and IP addresses.

I’m sure the corporations are working this out already, but of course with all the possibilities and bureaucracy it will take time for companies to sort out.  By far, the biggest issue holding back these services is the installation/configuration, but it will be interesting to see if ISP policy will hinder the development of these services in the future.  Hopefully not.