[conspire] Genuine IT question

[Mark Weisler]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, May 10, 2020 11:10 PM, paulz at ieee.org <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:

> Someone I know will soon be moving to a new house.  What to do about Internet access?  It appears that Waves, AT&T and Comcast might all be available.  Any comments on the first two?   Comcast's ads are so weird they must be targeting someone else.
>
> Second topic: Wifi Routers
>   Any models that might possibly cover full house?
>   Any compelling reason to pick model that can be upgraded with OSS firmware?  If so  DD-WRT?  tomato? openWRT?

I had to find another ISP after losing Raw Bandwidth last fall. I chose AT&T residential as an interim solution. Waves is not available in my neighborhood (Saratoga). Comcast is bewildering and irritating when dealing with their customer service folk. I guess it largely depends on who the customer is and what they want or need. I want a static IP but settled, for the time being, for AT&T's dynamic IP through their home service. This means they install a router which they insist on incorrectly calling a modem. I don't like intentionally using incorrect and misleading terms.

If your acquaintance will be OK with that sort of service, AT&T might be OK. However, if a goal is to have servers visible from outside the home, my experience with AT&T home service suggests looking for a different service. You might persuade AT&T to sell you some business class service with a static IP.
I can confirm that AT&T throttles Netflix. It's sometimes quite obvious and never happened, as far as I can tell, with Raw Bandwidth. Using my desktop computer, I log into Netflix and would normally see a screen full of icons representing movies. With AT&T it can take, say, 30 seconds to fully display the icons with, often half of them not visible for 30 to 60 seconds. Happens on more than just one computer so I think its a real phenomenon.

I got the AT&T package ( Fusion) that includes VoIP (which can be used with an antiquated DTMF phone) and TV. The phone is nearly useless as there are so many junk calls that I leave the ringer off rendering the phone, well, as I said, nearly useless.
I cannot watch a news session of, say, 15 minutes without service interruptions of three to five seconds at least a couple of times. "There were   __________people     _______ed when the trolley went of the tracks."  Those blank outs are infuriating. I'll have to hassle them about that and ask them to change my throttle settings.   Video and audio are stopped during these blank outs. (The TV device has a whirring, spinning disk drive. Couldn't AT&T simply buffer up some bits then feed them to the monitor without interruption? Sure they could. Or use RAM for the same purpose.)

While not immediately obvious reading the AT&T literature, Fusion is all TCP/IP meaning they use IP for voice, video and data. That router box that they say is required has the ability to do NAT so I suppose you can rig it to have servers in your home. I'd really rather not have AT&T accessing my router though. I also have my own router and switch which means I an "double NATed" for the time being. I suppose I could port all my NAT and other rules to the AT&T box but that is not appealing to me.

In my case Fusion service comes over two pair of old Pac Bell copper lines; that is, four conductors. The broadband cable to my house is now unused. I might have use for it if I have to go to Comcast business service to get back to my static IP.
I don't want to highjack this thread but I will have to soon go research whatever happened to our hopes that IPv6 would end the network address scarcity problem. Seems that IPv4 addresses remain scarce and command payment of about $20/month.
Good luck.

—Mark
Security on the internet is impossible without strong, open, and unhindered encryption.
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