[BBLISA] business class ISP recommendations

[Rich Braun]

Steve suggested:
> 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.

In my own experience, I moved from a Comcast residential DOCSIS-2 connection
in Cambridge (2000-2012) to an Astound Broadband DOCSIS-3 connection in San
Francisco (since 2012).  Astound's network was built by RCN, and sold off a
few years ago.

Honestly, at this point the epitome of price/performance is a race between
DOCSIS-3 and FIOS.  But I think a whole lot more construction is taking place
with DOCSIS-3 than FIOS, probably because there are several companies using it
whereas only one company supports FIOS.  DOCSIS-3 has the advantage of lower
cost:  it's exceedingly expensive to run fiber to every end-point, whereas
running RG-6 from a pole-mounted fiber box to several nearby buildings is
quite inexpensive.

At $50/mo for a 55-megabit down/5 megabit-up connection that simply NEVER goes
down, I don't see the point in "business"-class service.  I don't get to
control the PTR record but it really doesn't matter.  If I want a stable
end-point, I'm going to use an encrypted VPN anyway.  I'm not ever going to
use a service that attempts to authenticate my origin based on a DNS entry,
and filtering by origin-IP is at best a secondary line of defense.

As for stability of "dynamic" IP addresses:  I've had the same IP for two
years and counting with Astound, and with Comcast I recall one stretch of
about 7 years without any change.

My personal domains are hosted from home, on a pair of servers configured for
load-balanced HA the same as anything I do for a workplace.  (One of the
earlier suggestions was to run a pair of connections for improved outage
resilience, but unless you go full-on BGP I don't think you'll achieve it for
inbound services so you might as well put inbound services at a proper hosting
provider.)  My personal domains don't require more than 3-nines availability,
which my current setup provides.

Astound's consumer-grade service is a tad nicer than Comcast's in one area:
Comcast does port blocking (including the all-important port 80), and as near
as I can tell, Astound doesn't block anything.  I briefly had RCN before 2000,
they didn't port-block at that time but I don't know what their policy is now.

I'm actually surprised the consumer-grade services provide a stable public IP
address to each customer, in this era of NAT, at a time when 99.9% of
customers wouldn't even notice the lack of inbound reachability.  I think even
the cell-phone providers give you a public IP whenever you're connected.

Either I've been lucky with my consumer-grade services, or I'm just less picky
because I know that when I pay less, I have no expectation of being able to
reach a clueful support staff person.  Service quality has been robust, so
that made all the difference at my home addresses.

-rich