[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:

> Good Morning, Folks:
>
> I'm in the midst of taking a look at re-doing our internet service. We
> currently have a sychronous DS1 line (1.5Mbps in and out) which, being
> the non-profit we are, has been all we've been able to afford based on
> what we have. This DS1 line, with 24 routable internet addresses costs
> us about $600 month. If I go to a 36 month contract I can get it down
> to $450 or so.
>
> However, we're now in a position where we need a much larger download
> pipe than an upload pipe, so I started taking a look at asynchronous
> solutions. Taking a look at Comcast they were able to offer me 20Mbps
> down and 2Mbps up and 13 (down from 24) IP addresses for about
> $95/month.
>
> Now even if that 20Mbps down actually turns out to be, say, 5Mbps down
> there is still a night and day difference in the cost. It is such a
> large difference that I'm trying to figure out what I am fundamentally
> missing. Based on what I know know I can't think I could make any
> other recommendation to my Director. And I can't think how any other
> service, including the one I have now, remains competitive.
>
> I feel I'm missing something fundamental here. What are the
> experiences anyone on the list have had?

You might consider getting a cable modem and a DSL modem, and connecting 
to a "twin wan" or "dual wan" router that will give you two independent 
uplinks to the Internet. That will give you more reliability than a 
consumer grade pipe offers. The total cost and bandwidth would still be 
pretty good.

Servers will be a problem since at the price one won't announce your 
addresses from the other vendor. You could still have servers, but you 
would have to depend on DNS for moving load from one ISP to the other - 
which would be much slower and less reliable than BGP.

Daniel Feenberg

> ----
> Doc Kinne, AAVSO
> (From the Gmail Web Interface)
>
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