[ale] isp questions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Horkan Smith via Ale <ale at ale.org> writes:

> FWIW, I have a similar Comcast Business setup and have been generally
> happy with it.  It is *much* more expensive than residential.  And,
> while I haven't had local saturation problems, it likely shares
> equipment w/ residential in my area - they tend to go down / come back
> up around the same times.

Yes, Comcast Biz and Xfinity Residencial share the fiber-node
("last-mile") infrastructure, so you and your neighbors will go down at
the same time due to an outage there.  However behind the scenes, once
your packets hit the head-end, you're on completely different VLANs and
routed differently.

I know someone who was at one point a VP in the Comcast IP business
unit; when I first moved to Atlanta and got Comcast Biz Class I worked
with him to help them track down and fix a regional router
misconfiguration that was causing frequent network outages.  It turns
out they had redundant hardware but didn't have failover properly
configured, so any time the main router went offline (for scheduled or
non-schedule maintenance) it didn't fallback to the backup system.
OOPS.  Once they tracked and fixed that, the service was EXTREMELY
stable (at least until a battery failed in my node, at which point the
network would go out every time there was a neighborhood power outage).

Honestly, I was very happy with it from a stability PoV, however it was
very expensive and asymmetric.  Also, near the end of my time with them
they failed (multiple times) to roll a truck in their 4-hour service
window.  I do think I got better service than an average xfinity
customer would, but it wasn't the same SLA I signed up for anymore.

As I live in Sandy Springs, I was routing for Google Fiber, but they
didn't quite roll out in time and AT&T did.  Got a great deal from them
and I've been pretty happy.

> I'm (background) exploring the idea of a Digital Ocean VM w/ static IP
> to proxy/route/something my DNS, mail, web, ssh, etc traffic that's
> holding me to the local static IPs and modem rental.  Anybody made
> that switch?

Nah, I just use the /29 I've got from AT&T.

> later!
>   horkan

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant