The real problem, at least for us, is twofold. The first issue is purely administrative - keeping track of the assignments. The second issue is more "real". It doesn't scale well. It's not too bad for DSL, where the customer is at a fixed location. But when we were doing static IPs for dialup customers, dynamically remapping the address based on which city the customer happens to dial into causes routing changes to propagate throughout our entire network, which is something we want to avoid.
Another example is when a customer moves, say, from DSL to wireless. The IP address pools are tied to each technology, and can't be moved between them. (At least, that's the way *our* network is implemented.) So, if you have a single static IP on your DSL, you can't take it with you to your wireless link. If we're routing you a larger subnet of addresses, it's not a problem - we just change where we're routing the subnet.
By the way, thanks for all the kind words about us. I really appreciate it!
-- Bruce Robertson, President/CEO +1-775-348-7299 Great Basin Internet Services, Inc. company-wide fax: +1-775-348-9412 http://www.greatbasin.net my efax: +1-775-201-1553
Todd A. Jacobs wrote:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 02:52:39PM -0800, Ben Johnson wrote:
Can anyone recommend a good, local, and at least sort of Linux friendly ISP? Pyramid.net has the lowest price so far on DSL with a
Great Basin is very Linux-friendly. They also provide WISP to some areas. I can't really comment much on price, as they're too far away from my closest CO for me to use them, but their DSL seemed competitively priced the last time I checked into it.
(The static IP is for the vpn I plan to connect to this location with.)
You might shave some money by using a dynamic DNS service (such as dyndns.org) to get the benefits of static without the overhead of paying for fixed-IP. That's what I do; even if you buy the argument that ISP's need to assign dynamic addresses to conserve their IP space, almost all of them refuse to sell fixed-IP unless you buy them in multiple-address bundles (usually five addresses at a time), which of course drives up the price for no good reason that I can see.
Bottom line: choose your (W)ISP based on customer service, rather than anything else. They all have to use an SBC loop anyway, which is a relatively fixed cost, so the level of service they provide is their primary value-add, and the real differentiator between them. As long as you avoid Charter, you're more than halfway to good service anyway. :)
_______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
