Nailed-up connections (was Re: RCN)

[Rich Braun]

from the keyboard of jc at trillian.mit.edu:
> Somehow I suspect that we might not be talking about the same  thing.

We are; I'll elaborate further.

> Usually  when  someone mentions a phone line, the implication is that
> when you want to do something on the Internet, your machine  makes  a
> call and sets up a SLIP or PPP link.  But this is unidirectional in a
> very important sense:  If someone out in the rest of the world  wants
> to contact a server on your machine, can they do it?  Or do they just
> find that your phone link is down...

My line was up constantly; occasional interruptions were handled by the
pppd daemon running on my Linux box, which would simply redial until the
connection came back up.

> What I was talking about was the cost of a permanent, 24-hour  hookup
> that's live at all times.  ...

The reason I posted this about Erol's is that there is no session timeout
with their service, and I have the real-world experience of leaving a
nailed-up line in place for about 6 months (prior to installation of
my cable-modem service).  They do indeed let you leave it up, and you
don't pay anything beyond the $20/month basic price.  It's not profitable
for them to do that, but they figure most users don't do it and they haven't
had to set a policy against it.  (At wholesale, I pay just over $20/month
for the lowest priced lines in the roughly 2500-line dial pool I manage
at my current employer, a regional ISP.  I don't think the nationals get
a lower price.)

Erol's also happens to have wide coverage of local service in MA, so chances
are you can get by with unlimited-local service at $20/month for the dialout
line (plus the ridiculous taxes which seem to be pushing the prices upward
toward $30 lately).  I don't know what local phone rates are outside MA.

As I pointed out in my posting, the only difference between the Erol's
dynamic IP service (this same level of service is offered by a handful of
local ISP's, and I think some of the other nationals have unlimited service
without session timeouts) is the static IP address.

So, if "someone out in the rest of the world" wants to reach your
machine, you either have to pay the fee for a static IP (something
which costs about $50/month no matter where you turn, because address
space is a limited and scarce resource--the price won't ever go down),
or you have to play games like the one I did with posting my
IP-of-the-day to another site.

If *you* want to reach your machine from "out in the rest of the
world", as your initial posting implied, then you can get by without a
fixed DNS entry, and reach your machine from anywhere at any time so
long as you set up a way for your machine to post its address in a
place where you can find it.  I've been doing that kind of thing myself
since about 1991, with various kludges ranging through the following
phases:

- a SLIP connection into a Xylogics box at my employer way back then
- a TIAC PPP connection
- PPP connections into my own ISP
- a nailed-up Centrex ISDN line
- a 2-megabit wireless cable
- the Erol's kludge I described in this thread (which is the cheapest for
   those who don't have cable-modem access)
- on up to the RCN cable-modem connection I have now at $40 flat-rate, which
   features a quasi-stable IP address and a stable DNS entry (I could set
   up a CNAME to r83aap006214.sbo-smr.ma.cable.rcn.com, which is my
   permanent DNS name until I swap out the cable modem serial # 6214).

DSL will give cable a run for its money and help push prices down for
consumer access.  But what it sounds like you're really talking about is
static IP addressing, which is a whole different kettle of fish.  Until
IP6 comes out, which isn't even on the horizon yet--maybe when the I-93
Central/Artery Tunnel construction cranes finally disappear--the global
address pool numbers just 4.3 billion, of which only a fraction can be
used owing to the need for reserve allocations at most sites.

-rich
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