>We hope you enjoy your visit to our timeline. Around here, static IPs >cost about another $5 a month (that's the rate currently quoted at >www.visi.com, for example, as well as the number in my memory, and the >number reported on this list by a number of other people). And for >ADSL, at least one local ISP (a different one) does them ALL as static >IPs by default. (I'm in Minneapolis MN). This is unfortunately not a valid comparison. ISPs that started business 3 or 4 years ago had no problem getting massive blocks of IP addresses for their own use (a few places got entire /16s with virtually no justification). Today getting IPs is extremely difficult. We have around 1000 dialup ports, and can therefore justify a need for at least 1000 IPs, but it took a lot of cajoling to get just that. We aren't in a position to give away static IPs to dialup customers at any practical price. We have to conserve them for our dedicated and DSL customers because we can't guarantee that we'll get any more later. Unfortunately the people administering the IP address space kinda screwed up early on in their allocations, and now there's no real way to get the unused IP blocks back. Water under the bridge I guess. The point is that static IPs don't cost $5 at every ISP; they aren't even available at many, many ISPs. shag
