AT&T Warns U-Verse Users of Service Disruption → Re: If anyone bothered to read instead of bashing...

Obviously those folks are clueless.
From the article:

quote:

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They have told me that for $15/month I can get a private IP address. Maybe that is the key here, getting another $15/month?

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He said PRIVATE, not public or static. Ummmm... yeah, very trustworthy.. NOT. You can get 253 such addresses for free...
On the other side it appears that a STATIC IP is available for $15/mo... For those who are not experts a static IP is one that is not subject to change, as opposed to a dynamic IP that may be randomly assigned and changed by the system.

I agree that calling it a private IP would be incorrect, but it would still stand to reason that they may in fact offer a routable IP for a monthly fee. They could try to spin it as some sort of business-class service. They probably hope that, by making it cost $15/month, few will be willing to pay that much for it. That would make sense if they feel that they're running low on public IP addresses.

In any case, why else would they be doing this? If they're going to stop their RG's from handing out addresses in the 10.x.x.x range on the LAN side, there are only two reasons for that: they're either planning to use those addresses on the WAN side, or they want to add another device to the LAN side of the RG that will itself be a router and will use that range on its LAN. Not likely.

Moving towards a private IP on the WAN side has the potential to create a big mess and makes no sense from a business perspective as the amount of problems caused and support required would be overwhelming.
I highly doubt AT&T has any risk of running out of IPv4 addresses... they sit on a pool more than enough for the entire US population even at the rate of 1/household.

I don't know if you know how U-Verse works.

The IPs handed out to U-Verse are tagged by equipment. Usually, you'll never lose the same IP for the life of your equipment.

I've had the same "dynamic" IP for multiple years now, even after shutting off power to my RG for a day.

I've got access to web appliances (irrigation, HVAC, security cameras, garage door, lights), accessible via my IP address & port assignments that are great. With this new scheme, how do you propose I regain that functionality? Paying $15/month? I already get it for free.

"Usually" is the key word. A static IP takes any chance out of the equation.
I've had the same IP for 3 years...

Yeah, but sometimes "usually" is the best you can get, depending on what your ISP will give you.