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

[Jeremy T. Bouse]

I just dumped my Comcast Business Internet and Comcast Residential Cable
service at the first of the year. At that time Comcast was raising the
rate on the monthly router lease which I only begrudgingly got because
they said that was the only way I could get a /29 static subnet so I was
paying for the 50/10 internet service, the modem and the static IP
block. I went with AT&T GigaPower fiber. I'm getting 995/956 as of my
last speed test yesterday.  So to address Joey's comment about it not
being fiber to the side of the house, I can claim with 100% certainty
that I have fiber all the way into my second story room where my router
sits as I watched the tech run the fiber up to the box and plug it all
up. Then again the ADSL service I had years ago before going with
Comcast was delivered over fiber to the beige box in my neighbors yard
across the street where it went from the ONC to copper to the side of my
house, but in the past couple years AT& brought the fiber the last
25-50yards give or take to the side of the house.

So far in the 2 full months I've had the service I've had no outages and
I'm pushing TBs up and down through it. The only port blocking I've
encountered is their old grandfather's firewalling of 25/tcp outbound
but nothing stopping ports inbound so far that I've found. I have the
same /29 subnet worth of static IP addresses at $10 less per month than
Comcast and AT&T doesn't charge a monthly fee for the router and the
installation fee was waived for me. I'm currently paying half what I
paid for Comcast and have over 20x the bandwidth.  I was paying $150 to
Comcast for the Business internet and they were raising that so I went
with AT&T for $75 a month.

On 3/4/2019 7:24 PM, Jeff Hubbs via Ale wrote:
>
> 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:
>
>  1. 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.
>  2. 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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