Commercial use - Connection time out

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Comments

  • Of course I find https://www.teamviewer.com/en/support/commercial-use-suspected/ after i submitted this. This should be more evident somewhere and not had to jump through so many hoops to get stuff settled. 

  • For the past several months, I have been using teamviewer  without a problem to help my son and my grandchildre with school and family issues. A few days ago, I began getting messages that I will be blocked because of commercial use. Since I began using  Teamviewer nothing has changed in the nature of my use of teamveiwer. 3 days ago, I did a Teanviewer reset. Yet, the commenrcial use message  persists. I am retired and have no commercial interests. 

  • CGoldstein
    CGoldstein Posts: 1

    I have the exact same issue. I tried contacting them, but they never got back to me.

  • Chak
    Chak Posts: 1

    Same boat here.  I do use my corporate PC to access my home PC.  For any work related items I use my work services like **Third Party Product** or **Third Party Product**.   I can see where they might be confused, but in this case it is totally legitimate personal use.

     

  • Same here, happened just now
  • I am a retired guy running a non-commercial license to use TeamViewer to run a remote telescope.  I was recently kicked off TeamViewer as a suspected commercial user so I appealed and was reinstated.  Now I have a month-long trip coming up and I'd like to leave my PC at home and run the telescope using an iPad Pro.  Will simply installing and running TV from my iPad kick loose another round of being kicked off of TV again?  The first time I was kicked off was for no good reason and now I'm skitish about doing anything that's going to restart another unnecessary hassle.  It seems that the trigger for suspending service is extraordinarily sensitive so I've mostly switched to using Chrome Remote Desktop most of the time but that might not work for the iPad.

    Thanks for whatever guidance you can provide.

  • Can I please have my account reset?  I have submitted the form.

  • It may take a few days.  I subbmitted the form three days ago and just got my free acount back today.  

  • I got classified as commercial because I used the Quick-Support Android app to help my dad get uber rides on his phone while traveling.  I submitted the for and after three days I got my free status back.

    I think everyone must understand that TeamViewer is a for-profit company and we do not have a RIGHT to use their software for free for private use.  I am actually very impressed and grateful that they do offer it for free for personal use.  Very few other software companies that produce professional software do this.  I wish Adobe would stop charging private users, professional prices for their software like TeamViewer does.

    I suggest that you submit the form and explain your case.  

  • I turned in a Declaration of Private use form today. How long does it take for it to be reviewed?

    I use Teamviewer to monitor my son's laptop as he attends online public school. His ID was flagged for commercial use and we are trying to get it set back to a free account. 

  • But I am not!

  • So for some reason, my free account which I use MAYBE 5 times a year has been locked down because “your account Seems to be used in commercial environments”. I literally have my home computer, my laptop, my moms computer and my in-laws computers on them. How do I get my account corrected?
  • Today for the first time it happend to me when I was helping my wife. What is the name of the form we need to submit? Please share... 

    Thanks in advance...

  • Thansk @Johnhoward28 

    For some reason the form is not responding when entring teamviewer ID. I am trying to type but it does not accpet any characters and continues to show the "______". Even if I blank out the field it does not work and keeps showing the message that "This is a reqauired field." which I understand. 

    CORRECTION / UPDATE: Figured out that I have to give numeric TeamViewer ID of the remonte device I was helping with. I have submitted the request and hoping that it will be resolved in next three to four days... 

  • Currently TeamViewer determines commercial vs Non-Commercial usage based solely upon the source and or destination IP Address. I suspect it's a simple check to see who the IP of the Source and Destination is assigned to and if it's not assigned to a residential service (Like Shaw, Telus, Verision or AT&T) it simply considers it as a commercial IP and shoots out the five minute warning or simply drops the connection.

    And fair enough. However, Universities and other educational establishments fall afoul of this as they also seems ot be considered "Commercial" for whatever reason. Perhaps someone needs to look at and or update the Algorithm to take into consideration that Students attending a University (Living on Campus) are NOT commercial. 

     

  • Steve-in-FL
    Steve-in-FL Posts: 27 ✭✭

    <<Currently TeamViewer determines commercial vs Non-Commercial usage based solely upon the source and or destination IP Address.>>

    Well, their algorithm can't be that simple. I have 13 TeamViewer IDs and 12 of them are OK. One gets the commercial warning. They all use the same IP address outbound from my location (and they all go to private home on the other end). Why would only one of my IDs trigger their warning? In fact, it is one of 7 IDs that are used within my home that has a problem. There is no difference among the 7 at home.

  • In my conversations with the "TeamViewer Sales" guys that's how they informed me it works. They split IP Blocks into two seperate categories, Home and Commercial, which IMHO is a pretty narrow view of things as Internet Cafe's, Libraries, Schools, Colleges and Universities, Hospitals even, all seems to fall under the umbrella of "Commercial".

    And with over 37,000 Students at the University I work at, it seems a bit of a stretch to be asking them to fork over $500+/year to be able to use TeamViewer.

    The real question here is how and why do they consider such institutions as "Commercial" and block TeamViever usage on campus?

    And try as I might there's no real way to open a ticket, or speak with TeamViever 'proper' to address the issue either.

  • I think the issue here is that we are talking about a free service and expecting paid level support.  Customer support is extremely costly to maintain.  I am glad there is any kind of support and quite surprised that I was able to get my case handled in as short amount of time as it did (3 days).

    Another issue is that, as advanced as we are, technology is not nearly as precise and standardized as it needs to be in order for industry-wide simplification to be a reality. I am sure that TV does not want to wrongly classify a personal user as commercial, but the system to determine the difference between them is just not standardized or simple enough for them to be able to 100% accurate all the time.  That is just a reality of a rapidly and ever-evolving techno communication system. Things are just changing too rapidly for any sort of industry-wide standard to get a foothold long enough.  And about the time things start to smooth out, a new technology arises to throw the whole industry in havoc again.  Just think of 5G for example. It is just the nature of the ravenous beast that is technology.  To survive, it must and needs to feed on constant innovation. It's all part of the waste and churn economy of technology.

    I believe that TV cares about its free users.  But it also knows that TV is an extremely powerful tool that can be made to make good money and that some people are dishonestly claiming to be personal users but are actually making money with it.  So, they have to have a system in place to keep honest people honest.  Unfortunately, that means occasionally personally users might get caught in their net.  So, they have provided a form you can fill out to have your case looked at by a person to determine if you are legitimate personal users.  But that human person that is looking at your case manually does not work for free and needs to earn a paycheck.  So, the reality is that each time you file that form to have your account loked at, you are cost TV money for a service you are not paying a penny for. 

    I am just grateful for the service at all, and also grateful they even have a human CS department that handles request from FREE users.  I own PAID software that does not even have that level of service. 

     

     

  • @Johnhoward28 

    No, not really expecting nay level of support per se. I'm looking for some way of addressing a glaring oversight on their end of things where they have only two types of users, "Home" and "Commercial" and from what I was told during my phone conversation with TV it's IP Based.

    Although I totally understand their need to ensure that people who are using this softwar3e for commercial gain are in fact paying the licensing fee(s), and I fully support that. The medhodology they are currently using is, well somewhat difficult to comprehend. A simple IP Lookup using the ARIN Database will give you results in none to uncertain terms as to who actually owns a block of IP Addresses. check the "OrgName" and exempt those from the "Commercial" list of IP's they are blocking. 

    As I have said, I totally agree with TV imposing the restrictions and doing what they can to get those who are using TV for Commercial Gain to pay the licensing fee(s). I don't however agree with their assumption that Universities and other Educational Establishments should be considered as "Commercial" when they are doing those IP Based checks....

     

  • John,

    you are clearly missing the point here. Yes its great to provide a free service and this is not a given,. What I and most others have an issue with is to go and interupt a granted fee service and as part of a upsell campaign they use the worst way posible to determine who is a comercial user and who is not. Using an unreliabel WHOIS record to see who is comercial user and who is not is just stupid. In my case i help my wife with her personal laptop from time to time. Even so the Ip she uses belongs to a corp network does that mean its comercial use ? No it does not so i will go out and bet that the IP schema they are using is producing a true / false not anywhere near 50%. And if you pay for service and support with another product and dont get a response in 3 days i would reconsider the vendor. Now if you buy software and no support , you might not get a responed fast if at all. There is software and there is a service and TeamViwer is a Service that uses a software to deliver that service. No Response no Service = no Revenue.

  • @ilikethat44 

    I can see why they did it, it's just a little to heavy handed IMHO. 

    I've worked in the IT Field for over 30 years and I suspect that TV is probably using an PBL (Policy Block List) to determine who or what is or is not 'Commercial' and what is or is not "Residential". It's not the best methodology, but it owuld be the simplest way to implement they type of restriction they are imposing.

    But that's just a guess....

  • @WB4IUY 

    Possibly, check your terms of service (Any my previous post) I'm just speculating here as to how they are differentiating between resedential and commercial....

    73's de VE6OMC

  • @ScratchMang

    You clearly have a better understanding of technology than me.  Maybe you should apply to TV for a job and help them fix this issue since you seem to know what they should do.

    As far ar Universities go, they are FOR-Profit institutions.  They make billions off of charging outrageous fees to young impressionable students for degrees that are not worth the paper they are written on.  If I had my way, I would make a law that universities could only offer internal financing, so that they would have the incentive to encourage students to choose degrees that could actually make money to pay back their 100K loans.  There is no love loss between me and the US university system. 

  • Steve-in-FL
    Steve-in-FL Posts: 27 ✭✭

    In an earlier message, TeamViewer said,

    "The free version can only be used in a private environment - for example if you help friends or relatives in your free time and do not receive any money for it.
    Commercial use is every usage in a business environment. This means, if you use it at work or support customers and colleagues, it will be commercial usage. Therefore you are not allowed to use the free version of TeamViewer in any office environments. As soon as one of the PCs participating in a session is connected to a commercial network (office/school/etc.) it is considered commercial use."

    So it is not a mistake when they wave the commercial flag at someone in a school or a non-profit or any business environment. It is the result of a conscious decision they made as to what they consider commercial. I may not like it, but it's their decision. People who complain because their own definitions of commercial aren't the same as TeamViewer's are just out of luck.

    My beef is the arbitrary way multiple IDs in the same environment are considered differently. I have 7 IDs that I use in my house and one of them gets the flag, the other 6 do not. The inconsistency and lack of predictability is the problem.

  • @ilikethat44 

    I have been using TV since it first came out.  I can't remember the exact date but it was the same month when **Third Party Product** started charging for their service.  Ten years or maybe more. 

    This is the very first time I have ever got flagged for commercial use, and I know exactly why it happened.  It happened because I used the new Andriod Quik-Support app to help my 78-year-old father who is traveling and needed to use Uber to get a ride on his smartphone. He was standing on the side of the road while I walked him through the installation of the Quick-Support, setup his uber account and showed him how to use it.  It was really amazing to be able to help him 2000 miles away like. 

    A few days later he was having trouble with text messaging and he called me to help him.  As soon as I logged onto his phone, I got the warning that I was suspected of commercial use.  My guess is that, after ten years of connecting to the same computers, that when TV saw me suddenly start connecting to a new IP address 2000 miles away, they assumed that I was doing some kind of remote support for a client.  That is just my guess.  When I filled out the form to have my account reviewed, I explained everything to them about why there a sudden change in the pattern of my usage of TV and got reinstated. 

    It is my experience that tech companies do not like to argue with customers.  If the answer is YES, they will tell you.  If the answer is NO, then they will just say nothing at all.  If you have filled out the form and waited a reasonable amount of time (A week or more), I would say that they probably have looked at your account and did not believe your explanation, or did not have enough explanation or information for them to positively rule out commercial use.

    Believe me, I know it can be a real pain in the **bleep**. I was pretty ticked off when I could not help my father.  My father has no patience.  He wants what he wants RIGHT NOW!  If I don't help him, he will try to do things himself and that usually means him breaking stuff that I have to fix.  When I could not help him the other day, he went looking for help from strangers.  He found so-called "Tech Expert," told him that the memory on his Galaxy S6 Active smartphone was full and that he needed to install a Micro-SD card to expand his meory.  So the tech expert started prying around on the phone trying to open it up to get to the SD card slot. 

    I was very fortunate that my father called me before they destroyed the phone completely.  Every person in the Tech industry knows that Samsung did not put an expandable memory slot on the S6 line of phones and that they are sealed and do not have a removable battery.  For some reason, this "Tech Expert" did not know this, or even how to do a google search to look up this information.  Go figure. LOL!

    Just letting you know that I feel your pain. 

  • @Johnhoward28

    As to the comment "You clearly have a better understanding of technology than me." The only answer would be "Maybe". I've been int he business for some 30 odd years now, I do like to think I have a general idea of how things work, but then I'm always learning new things so my overall understanding of all things IT is up for debate :)

    As to Universities being "For-Profit" institutuions I think you are confusing For Profit Institutions int he States to the rest of the world. I know that's not the case here in Canada.
    As to the particular situation I'm in, the University I work for has a "Remote Desktop" solution that we pay handsomly for, and the Helpdesk people use it to great advantage when supporting Staff and the like. It's more about the 37,000+ Students here on campus who are, as you state are already paying those "outrageous fees" and to add in another $500/year for them to be able to help their parents every coupole of months due solely to the fact that they are using Campus infrastructure is a bit of a kick in the nards IMHO.....

  • @Steve-in-FL 

    I agree, it's their call as to what and how they classify things as commercial. And again you are correct it's my interpretation that a "School or University' is not really a commercial environment like say Microsoft or Chevron would be.

    However the same argument could be made for your situation, why would you need 6 or 7 machine in your house to have Teamviewer installed on them? Are any of them Server operating systems like 2008 or 2012? Those would represent commercial usage. I think a far better argument could be made that someone with that many machine on a Local network that require Teamviewer represents a commercial enterrise then a School where the majority of the users would be students. Why are you not using Remote Desktop? If it's Linux SSH and pipe X over that?

    A simple IP blocking mechanism, altogh effective in some ways, needs to be implemented with a bit more selectiveness then two simple categories....

     

  • Here's a fictional family's house, loosely based on mine.

    1) My PC
    2) My laptop
    3) PC connected to TV in lounge
    4) Dad's PC
    5) Dad's laptop
    6) Mum's laptop
    7) Mum's android phone

    Teamviewer is installed on all of the above, so I can access my PC when I'm away, I can schedule and delete TV recordings without having to be in the lounge or even at home, and I can provide assistance to my not-so-tech-literate family. That's how you can have 7 TV instances in a given location.

    As for Universities, outside of the USA, there are a huge amount that aren't "for-profit". As has already been pointed out, TV's policy would appear to prevent commercial use from a University. It would also prevent a student at that University from supporting their friends or family. It's the using a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach.

  • Steve-in-FL
    Steve-in-FL Posts: 27 ✭✭

    @ScratchMang 

    It's nice that you agree with some of my statements. Thank you.

    But when you say, "why would you need 6 or 7 machine in your house to have Teamviewer installed on them," that's really not your question to ask. All of those uses are legitimate. I have a computer that records television and videos and sends the recorded programs to different televisions, I have a computer that has all my house data on it that other computers link to for access, I have three laptops and two desktops. All of them run Windows 10 Home. When my wife is sleeping and I don't feel like walking into the bedroom to get her laptop, I use TeamViewer to access it. When I am watching the television and need to look at the media recording machine at the same time, I use TeamViewer to get into it. Could I use another product? Maybe. But TeamViewer is an excellent product that I have been using for years. I see no reason to change.

    You said, "I think a far better argument could be made that someone with that many machine on a Local network that require Teamviewer represents a commercial enterrise..." I suppose it's your right to think that, but your concept of "that many machines" does not match my concept. And your idea of "too many machines" certainly doesn't imply, let alone define, a commercial use.

    Last, you ask, "Why are you not using Remote Desktop?" Because TeamViewer is a great product, that offers far more capability than many others. None of the other free programs that I have tested gives you a contact list of machines that you connect to. They all require you to keep a separate list of target connection names. I don't think Remote Desktop offers a contact list, but I might be wrong.

    But the point is, it is TeamViewer's definition that counts. And I accept their definitions. As I said in an earlier note, it's the inconsistent and unpredictable way their warnings and penalties are implemented with which I take issue.