Friday, September 19, 2014

IP changes coming - probably new ISP as well

It seems that Somebody has decided to eliminate the legacy Speakeasy circuit that our Internet connection currently runs on. It's not entirely clear who.

Guy on the phone from Megapath, who was apparently confused about who actually provides my local phone service, referring to "Qwest", a company that has not existed for a number of years now, seems to think it was the phone company's decision, except I wouldn't have thought the regs would allow this (though I may be behind on just how much the regs concerning ILECs and ISPs have been corrupted by now). Letter from Megapath suggests that this was an internal Megapath decision, i.e., they're just tired of maintaining it, in which case, with that plus dealing with the Mumbai call centers, the layoffs of Speakeasy-knowledgeable people, and other shit that has happened since the Speakeasy buyout, plus the lingering resentment over the crap that Covad pulled 10 years ago (now that Megapath also owns Covad), I think I might finally be tired of being their customer -- I suppose it's a measure of how wonderful Speakeasy was to deal with that I gave them the benefit of the doubt and held out this long.

Still exploring options. CenturyLink is offering a 12M/2M fibre-optic connection for about 1/2 what I'm paying now. The one annoying thing is it has to be a business line for me to get the static IPs (which then means they can't bundle it with the residential phone service the way they're doing now, and for some reason business phone service is insanely expensive). On the other hand the business call-center people seem to be far more clueful -- having the residential call-center person asking me what an IP is wasn't inspiring lots of confidence.

The one thing I know for certain is that sometime in the next few weeks, my service needs to change to Something New. The one noticeable thing on your end will be all-new IP addresses for everything. Which, in theory, should be able to happen mostly seamlessly, but we'll see how that goes.