US Telco Support > CenturyLink > Static IP price increase on June 12?

reply to Go Tarheels

Re: Static IP price increase on June 12?

I'll wager the underlying charge for your Comcast business line is far more than $39 per month.

Comcast business accounts start at $69.95 for the 8/2 offering, but that's not really the point.

The only reason to bump the static IP fee is to bolster revenue -- not that there is anything overtly wrong with that. I do find it puzzling that Embarq would drop the price on their 10mbps service, which has greater cost implications in terms of provisioning and infrastructure fees, while jacking up the price on static IPs.

Unless the motivation is try to remove support of static IPs by incrementally bumping to cost to deter people from requesting statics?

That is really the point. You pay almost twice what the mid-priced Embarq tier costs so naturally Comcast is less likely to try to make their profits on ups and extras (as Earl Schieb used to say) like static IP addresses.

An equivalent offering in Embarq-land is the $54.95 10/896 service, which for $10 extra I get a whopping single fixed address.

Comcast's $69.95 8/2 tier might be $15 more, but the upstream is more than twice as fast and for $10 I get 12 more usable IP addresses than Embarq will give me.

This move isn't likely to gain Embarq a ton of revenue -- you're going to have a bunch of people dropping their static IP, which most likely isn't going to be offset by the people still willing to pay the $10 premium. They'd be better off bumping the base cost of each of the plans by $1 and partying like rockstars with the extra revenue.

With as big of an increase as this is, it really does read like they want to drop support for static IPs but right now too many people have them. If that were the strategy, then bumping the cost to reduce the number of people with this configuration would be the first step to eliminating the offering.

I hope I'm wrong -- I like my static address.

Embarq has very limited deployment of 10/.896 and can barely get 5/.768 to most so that tier is not a valid comparison. A better one would be the $39.95 3/.512.

Plus, we haven't even verified what this is all about yet, especially considering that "Earthlink" mention. Are you in an Embarq territory?

Pass it upwind that this is a very silly price increase. I would drop the static IP myself if Embarq could manage to get my line to not retrain sixteen times a day.

reply to RadioDoc

Mine in Florida has been up and running since Dec. 2005 so we're about the same there timewise. I have a static IP address because they can't seem to keep the line from resetting every few hours. The modem retrains very fast but if I had to go DHCP or (gasp!) PPPoE on it, that would pretty much make it unusable. Having the bridged static is the only way it works, but now that Comcast finally got their act together and is offering functional HSI in my area for about the same price I'll have to seriously consider switching (and anyone familiar with me knows how painful it is for me to consider).

The thing that really chaps my ass about it is that I spent the better part of two hours on the phone with Embarq a little over two weeks ago redoing POTS and LD on this line to bring it up to date with current offerings (the line has been active since 1985) and there was not one peep about this increase. They managed to do exactly what I requested they not do (dropped it from 5 to 3 megs) in the process, which was un-done by a very diligent CSR the next week and STILL no mention of this. Yeah I know it's only five bucks but it is a hell of a lot of goodwill to piss away for that amount of increased revenue.

afaik they didn't tell the CSR's (but i could be wrong). I'm a data technician and I wasn't aware of this until I read it on the forum. Haven't seen a mention of it on the Data or CSR news/updates pages either.. So I don't think that they intentionally with-held it from you. But that's just my thought - I could be wrong.

reply to RadioDoc
I guess I should consider myself lucky - i have 10meg service and I have never had the problem you guys are describing - my modem's uptime is over 30 days right now (DHCP, bridged modem) without a loss of sync. But it could be that I have a loop length of only 2800ft.

reply to espaeth
With static IP pools, we may put a /26 in the redback and only half of them are used (much less in residential areas). This leaves A LOT of dormant IP space. With dynamic IP pools we will use a /21 pool and is easier to control and break up further if needed. Hopefully that explains it

reply to RadioDoc
Radio,

Maybe I'm not following how a bridged static keeps the line up? Line connectivity is layer 1 as IP is layer 3.

I think that RadioDoc is saying that his connection keeps dropping, however if he is assigned a static then there is a chance to reconnect before any existing network connections drop. If you have a dynamic account, then you will usually be assigned a different ip address on reconnection so there is no chance of existing network connections being maintained.

Ah ok, well with dynamics assigned to MAC addresses and not dropped but every 15min - 60min - then it would be the same thing.... Radiodoc should see about getting his line fixed permanently.

Radio - Embarq doesn't use PPPoE - they use dynamic addressing based off your router's MAC address - so I don't think you would see the same issue.