[ale] State of play re home Internet with static IP

[James Taylor]

I've had comcast business for quite some time. 
I have 150/20 with 1 phone #(which I don't actually use) and 5 usable static for about 180/month. 
I have only had one outage longer than a couple of hours, and that was when power was out for most of Marietta for 18 hours last year after an ice storm. 
I have things I can complain about, but the service has be rock solid. 
-jt 



James Taylor
678-697-9420
james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com



>>> Jeff Hubbs via Ale <ale at ale.org> 3/4/2019 7:24 PM >>>

After many years at the status quo (AT&T UVerse and POTS land line) I'm finally looking into a rework of the home telecomm situation. 
I have two main drivers that are forcing the decision: 

Even after the shortest of power outages, upstream UVerse service goes dead and stays dead for 10-20 minutes. This was not always the case but in the last few years it's been the "new normal;" my wife works at home via VPN enough that that's a problem, and it's no good for me either. Yes, I have UPSses out the wazoo on everything and it doesn't matter. I've tried to get through to AT&T by phone to at least get the problem acknowledged but that's been impossible. 

There's a good chance I might be leaving town for my next job for an unknown amount of time, but that won't mean that I'll stop being the "IT guy" for the house; I will simply *have* to be able to shell in from the outside. If there is such a thing as a "reflector" service that sits on the Internet - even if it's my own server somewhere - that gives me a way to tunnel in reverse through some kind of connection that's initiated from inside the house, I don't want to be dependent on it. 

Being able to run my own Internet-reachable web and email servers in the house is anticipated but is secondary to those two main drivers.  
It is my understanding that only AT&T and Comcast serve my street.

I've spoken to a rep for Comcast Business and they're telling me that within reason (with respect to affected region(s) and length of outage, I presume) their service will remain unaffected by power outage. That handles 1. above, and they also offer as few as one static IP address which should be sufficient to handle 2. 
I have not yet called about any of AT&T's business residential offerings but when I got a flyer in the mail about some kind of fiber service being available in my neighborhood and called to inquire, I couldn't get anything even remotely like a straight answer but the upshot was that no, the fiber service wasn't available to me. I'm quite rather done with AT&T, to be honest. 
Comcast says they can give me a VoIP-like service that can optionally use my old phone number. I'm undecided on that; the phone rings with random robocalls and other solicitations 3-5 times a day (Do Not Call list notwithstanding) and there are only 3 living persons whom we know who ever, *ever* call that line. 
We would like to have a TV service with DVR available and it's my understanding from talking to Comcast that it would have to be Xfinity piggybacked on the Comcast Business service. It would be either that or satellite to still have DVR. I've never dealt with satellite service before but the houses to either side of us have it. I've built an HDTV antenna and mounted it in the attic but I haven't completed the cabling to know for sure how well it will work, and if we went that route, there'd be no DVR unless I went the whole MythTV (or equivalent) route and I'm really not willing to try that again. 
I'm all (rabbit) ears, so let your replies rip.

- Jeff
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