[Dr. Keter]

Full disclosure, my friend is the one affected, but we discovered this together. We'll call him A.

So after not paying his bill, A found that any time he tried to load a site, he would be redirected by Charter to a site telling him to renew his subscription. However, he was still able to use Skype. Long story short, if you directly used an IP address instead of the URL, you can still connect. However, since sites often load resources from other sites, you'd need to add all exceptions to your hosts file. We don't know why this is possible, but we assume it has something to do with DNS. We are also looking in to writing a program to automatically unblock sites on connection, although we don't really know how to go about doing that.

Does anyone know what might be going on here?

[Nil]

It seems like the subscription allows him to contact the ISP's DNS server. His router would have gotten DNS server info from the ISP. And now he's just simply lost the ability to communicate with them.

Edit: It's weird that you can still connect using IP addresses despite not paying the bill. What happens when you use a custom DNS server?

[Panther_]

Yes most likely DNS. Try changing DNS server, http://dns.d0wn.biz, maybe use DNS crypt on top of that and maybe try using a VPN to see if you can just get away with it always.

[Blink]

Change DNS and you'll get free internet 4 life! But seriously, this is retarded on the ISP's end.

[Bish0pQ]

I definitly think you can work your way around this pretty easy and get free internet. My ISP blocks everything entirely if I don't pay my bill.

[Dr. Keter]

Next time I get the chance to mess around with it, I'll try switching the DNS server. I feel like I tried this before and it didn't work, but I don't remember. I'll update the thread when I find out.

[Satan]

This is probably only working before your non-payment hits the stage where they dont believe you'll resubscribe, where they'll completely cut internet access.

[Dr. Keter]

This is probably only working before your non-payment hits the stage where they dont believe you'll resubscribe, where they'll completely cut internet access.

This is most likely the case.

[Nil]

This is probably only working before your non-payment hits the stage where they dont believe you'll resubscribe, where they'll completely cut internet access.

That is also what I was thinking. I'm actually really curious about this. Often times ISP's will allow users to only access webpages associated with their company after missing payments and everything else is off limits. Other times, sites are simply blacklisted and you have limited access that probably isn't much use anyway. But I haven't been able to find any information on why you can access sites using IP addresses (is it any site, or did you only test one that may have not been blacklisted anyway?) Unless, of course, no one has bothered trying that since it's not very practical anyway. Therefore the ISP's cut you off from their DNS servers, and disallow you from connecting to any other ones until you make payment (which may be why using an external DNS won't work like you think you tried already). Possibly after a certain time, or upon unsubscribing, the entire connection is shut off. Would be cooler if someone here worked for an ISP and could clarify

[Dr. Keter]

So, we tried changing the DNS servers in his router. It doesn't redirect to Charter anymore, but it also doesn't load anything. If I set up a VPN on my network, and he connected through it, he'd be able to use the internet normally right? I might try that next.