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coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw

Member

[Qwest] Moving -- Ordering 40/20.


Old Business DSL Pricing
I'm moving in town again, and this time, to a townhome (which is classified as a single family unit, and although I don't know how many pairs are going to it, I can see the NID/demarc on the front of the unit) which is fairly close to the DSLAM. When looking at the business site, CenturyLink qualifies it for 40/20, 60/30, 80/40, and 100/12. I see there's another thread about 40/20 right now, but I have a few thoughts and questions, so I figured I wouldn't clog up that thread.

This may not be something somebody here has done before, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask anyway. I successfully moved my static IP, PPPoE account, and whole connection in town before, but given that it looks like bonding is available at that address, I was wondering if it maybe wasn't worth the effort and added expense on my part to use this move (and the physical move of all of my equipment, etc) as an opportunity to go to small business service, either "Office Internet" or CoreConnect. (The main difference between those two services is that you get a voice line with CoreConnect, and I think that CL uses the attach rate for that service as an incentive, and as such, lowers the price of the overall service a bit.)

Right now, I'm paying about $45/mo for 1536/896 kilobits (T1 fed remote DSLAM, my stats are beautiful but the T1s get in the way of anything better) and I don't have voice service. I have one static IP, and I've been told previously that I can't take that particular IP (or my PPPoE login) with me when I move to a business account, so I'm preparing for that particular effort.

If I stick with residential, I believe it will be about $35/mo for a year ("new customer" bonus) and probably somewhere between $76-95 or so after that.

If I go with "Office Internet" 40/20 is $152, and all of the bonded tiers are simply too expensive for me to look at. (My ultimate hope is that CL will bring the cost on pair bonding down.)

If I switch to Internet+Phone ("CoreConnect"), it looks like I'm looking at about $125/mo, plus local fees.

I've attached an old pricing list. It looks like that's about accurate still, but of course everything has been increased by $2/mo since I made the it. They include Office365 Essentials, but there's no mention of how many users you get.

(Sidenote: The cable company in town doesn't known the meaning of the word "reliability" and their pricing is still insane, as indicated in the post I linked above, so they are essentially off the table for me.)

Static IP pricing for my area is here: »internethelp.centurylink ··· g-q.html -- it may be worth moving to five IPs so I can do neat things like run my SharePoint and Exchange servers on separate IPs without having to deal with reverse proxying. One IP is about $6/mo and eight (five usable) is about $15.

So I guess the main question is: would you bother switching over to business up front or do you think I can get what I need on residential for a while? I have run up against the 150GB download quota on my 1.5M connection, so I have no problems thinking I'll easily run up against a 250GB quota with 40M down. (The vast majority of my use will probably be uploads, and those aren't counted on CL's residential quotas.)

Given that this is going to be a single pair install at first, I'll probably just use my existing Q1000 or bridge the C1000 I have on hand. One thing that would be interesting to hear is if anybody has experience using multiple static IPs on CenturyLink service, either with CL's gateway or bridged to their own router. (I have a router but would be open to buying a new one.)

Also, has anybody heard about whether or not CL over-provisions single pair business installs? Going from 40M to 50M is almost certainly a given with how close the DSLAM is, but I'm also unlikely to drop back down to residential class service just to get the over-provisioning.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
toneloc
join:2015-03-07
Minneapolis, MN

toneloc

Member

said by coryw:

So I guess the main question is: would you bother switching over to business up front or do you think I can get what I need on residential for a while? I have run up against the 150GB download quota on my 1.5M connection, so I have no problems thinking I'll easily run up against a 250GB quota with 40M down. (The vast majority of my use will probably be uploads, and those aren't counted on CL's residential quotas.)

CenturyLink in my experience doesn't care about caps on fiber fed services, as there's no bandwidth exhaustion issues(I believe it's 10GB Ethernet). When they're fed by T1's, i'm sure it's a different story.

I've got 40/5 residential, and I can tell you I've easily blown bast 250 gb/month and I've yet to hear anything from them.
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn to coryw

Member

to coryw
I went with the 40/5 for $31 per month (1 yr) and they have continued to let me re-up my one year contract for the same price. I would try try CL's residential first (because of the big price difference) and you could always roll over to CL's business service if it is not working out. I don't use a static ip. Therefore, I don't know how that ties in with your needs.
brad152
join:2006-07-27
Chicago, IL

1 edit

brad152 to coryw

Member

to coryw
said by coryw:

I'm moving in town again, and this time, to a townhome (which is classified as a single family unit, and although I don't know how many pairs are going to it, I can see the NID/demarc on the front of the unit) which is fairly close to the DSLAM. When looking at the business site, CenturyLink qualifies it for 40/20, 60/30, 80/40, and 100/12. I see there's another thread about 40/20 right now, but I have a few thoughts and questions, so I figured I wouldn't clog up that thread.

This may not be something somebody here has done before, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask anyway. I successfully moved my static IP, PPPoE account, and whole connection in town before, but given that it looks like bonding is available at that address, I was wondering if it maybe wasn't worth the effort and added expense on my part to use this move (and the physical move of all of my equipment, etc) as an opportunity to go to small business service, either "Office Internet" or CoreConnect. (The main difference between those two services is that you get a voice line with CoreConnect, and I think that CL uses the attach rate for that service as an incentive, and as such, lowers the price of the overall service a bit.)

Right now, I'm paying about $45/mo for 1536/896 kilobits (T1 fed remote DSLAM, my stats are beautiful but the T1s get in the way of anything better) and I don't have voice service. I have one static IP, and I've been told previously that I can't take that particular IP (or my PPPoE login) with me when I move to a business account, so I'm preparing for that particular effort.

If I stick with residential, I believe it will be about $35/mo for a year ("new customer" bonus) and probably somewhere between $76-95 or so after that.

If I go with "Office Internet" 40/20 is $152, and all of the bonded tiers are simply too expensive for me to look at. (My ultimate hope is that CL will bring the cost on pair bonding down.)

If I switch to Internet+Phone ("CoreConnect"), it looks like I'm looking at about $125/mo, plus local fees.

I've attached an old pricing list. It looks like that's about accurate still, but of course everything has been increased by $2/mo since I made the it. They include Office365 Essentials, but there's no mention of how many users you get.

(Sidenote: The cable company in town doesn't known the meaning of the word "reliability" and their pricing is still insane, as indicated in the post I linked above, so they are essentially off the table for me.)

Static IP pricing for my area is here: »internethelp.centurylink ··· g-q.html -- it may be worth moving to five IPs so I can do neat things like run my SharePoint and Exchange servers on separate IPs without having to deal with reverse proxying. One IP is about $6/mo and eight (five usable) is about $15.

So I guess the main question is: would you bother switching over to business up front or do you think I can get what I need on residential for a while? I have run up against the 150GB download quota on my 1.5M connection, so I have no problems thinking I'll easily run up against a 250GB quota with 40M down. (The vast majority of my use will probably be uploads, and those aren't counted on CL's residential quotas.)

Given that this is going to be a single pair install at first, I'll probably just use my existing Q1000 or bridge the C1000 I have on hand. One thing that would be interesting to hear is if anybody has experience using multiple static IPs on CenturyLink service, either with CL's gateway or bridged to their own router. (I have a router but would be open to buying a new one.)

Also, has anybody heard about whether or not CL over-provisions single pair business installs? Going from 40M to 50M is almost certainly a given with how close the DSLAM is, but I'm also unlikely to drop back down to residential class service just to get the over-provisioning.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

Just get what you can installed, and then if you want to try for the residential 100/12 or 80/40 fight with them later on getting the pair bonded service installed. That's what I did, took two months but was totally worth it in the end to have it.

Honestly I've been trying Cox Cable's 150/20 package and while the additional speed has been nice (and actually consistent this time), the billing has been screwed up both months. I'm just glad I only "paused" my CenturyLink service as I'm sure i'll be back again within a few months!
coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw

Member

Just as a follow-up, I decided to go ahead and place an order for 40/20 with CoreConnect. CoreConnect is still $85/mo and the price of the 40/20 speed package on top of CoreConnect is $40. There will be local taxes and fees on the PSTN line that's included.

I'm going to tack on some IPs (it'll be eight, the gateway gets one and five will be assignable) onto the order, which is another $15/mo, and they have a promotion which the web site said they'd add a $10/mo promotional discount, so I should be paying net about $130/mo.

Even if that $10/mo promotional discount doesn't get added, I feel like I'm paying market value for what I'm getting, especially given that Office365 is included. (Woefully it's not an edition that will provide desktop apps, but it'll be a convenient off-site file dump.)

Not all of the five IPs is spoken for so far, I think I'll end up moving my existing setup (Small Business Server 2011 Standard) on the main/gateway IP, just how I have it set up now, and my new Exchange and SharePoint VMs on their own new IPs. I'm sure I'll have some way to use the other IPs, new Linux VM to replace a hosted product I have now, separate VPN server, who knows.

I have the installation scheduled for the day I am set to be able to move in. I'm likely going to order my IPs after it gets installed and then move my server and re-configure my DNS and RDNS at the tail end of the move.

The area qualifies for bonding, as I mentioned before, but the port tax is so insane that it makes more sense to sign up for a second account than to do bonding. (like, a second account with its own set of static IPs and its own PSTN connection.)

I don't know what I'm going to do with a PSTN connection at home. They let you pick from three phone numbers in whatever the most ideal exchange for that area is, and so I picked one that looked like it would be easy to dial. Everything says it's totally unlimited, but they also say that if you use more than 3000 minutes, you can be investigated for compliance with the terms of service. (I presume this means you can't be connected to some dat service for an excessive time period, but I'll have to review the terms in more detail.)

I'll probably just hook up a regular phone and answering machine to begin, but I'd eventually like to set up a Lync or Asterix server, which conveniently will probably also be getting one of those IPs.

I haven't heard yet, specifically, but I'm sort of rooting for an over-provision, because I know it'll shoot straight up to 50M. The local cableco recently improved its "base" tier to 30 and its middle tier to 50, so even though 20 megabits of upload is really a more important product for me, it would be nice to be able to say "Well, technically I have 50" even though what'll happen is the modem will sync at exactly 50M and real-world performance would be a little bit more like 48-49, due to PPPoE overhead.

An issue I will tackle "later" is the router. I ordered a modem with the service, even though I'm 99% sure either of the devices I already have on hand will work fine. (Q1000 and C1000A) but there's always the possibility something wacky is going on, and $99 to have a spare on hand isn't something I'm personally bothered by. I have a Linksys E4200 on hand, which will run DD-WRT, but I haven't looked into what'll be involved in that, including things like setting a static route out to the modem and making use of the additional available IPs. It will take long enough for me to migrate SharePoint and Exchange that I may actually figure out the routing issue first, but that'll ultimately be a story for later.