[BBLISA] business class ISP recommendations

[stephen g. wadlow]

On May 15, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Alex Aminoff <alex at basespace.net> wrote:

> On 5/15/2014 2:22 AM, Tom Metro wrote:
>> cost effective for a home office
> 
> You can get a T1 from Cogent for $400/mo. There's also the Cambridge Bandwidth Collective, which can get you a T1 for less than that. Support is on a do it yourself or wait for a volunteer to have time basis however at the CBC.

Just as an FYI:  The Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium no longer offers T1s.   We do offer IPv4/IPv6 tunnels, and may have a small bit of 1U hosting available in the near future.

> I suspect that the problem with the area on the price/quality curve in between $30/mo for a residential cable and $300/mo for a T1 with BGP is there is not that much demand, so no economies of scale, so relatively higher price and worse quality than you would expect if the curve was smooth.

T1s for data are old tech.    When we were decommissioning the CBC T1s, we had a lot of difficulty getting someone within Verizon to know how to process a T1 disconnect order.  Verizon really doesn't seem to care about them any more.

> My suggestion: get 2 of the cheapest residential connections you can find and set up a router to switch between them as one or the other is down.
> 
> You asked about static IPs however. That is thornier. You could probably rig up something with 2 bad providers as I suggested using dynamic DNS, but it seems to me you would be better off getting a real or virtual server in a data center, which these days is usually less than $100/mo, and then home connections purely for your own access out to the internet.

My suggestion is slightly different:    Host the important stuff that needs 24x7 at someplace like Basespace or CBC, and then get business class at home.   A few of the people in the CBC have business class Comcast or FiOS connections, and the CBC provides a tunnel (usually IPv4, but in theory it could be IPv6) to their location, giving them a /28 or so of IPv4 space at home.

I used to host a lot of stuff at home, but honestly, even with a T1 and a cable modem, it wasn't worth it.    The important stuff I put someplace reliable, so that I don't have to worry about the last mile nearly as much.

							-Steve
							(occasionally representing the CBC here)