S and I are looking at switching ADSL providers to a provider when also provides a phone service over VoIP, and I thought, "Hey, since I'm going to switch our phone over to VoIP, and our 'net connection will have to be online all the time for the phone to work, it'll have a fixed IP as part of the plan, right?". So I finally found the right person to ask at the new ISP and was told "No". It turns out I need to pay an extra $10 a month for a fixed IP.
Is it just me or is the whole attitude towards fixed IP addresses on ADSL lines crazy? First a little bit of history.
Back in the early days of dial-up Internet usage all users were allocated a fixed IP address. You just got one, I still have my letter from
Actrix Networks from 1996 which had my connection information, including my allocated IP address. Then when the number of users grew large enough that ISPs didn't have enough IP addresses available to allocate to more users, users were switched to dynamic IP addresses (so you received a different IP every time you connected). This worked okay since most people were only online for short periods of time, and allowed for the customer base of ISPs to grow, without further exhausting the IPv4 address pool.
So, the reason that the industry switched to dynamic IP addresses was to make the best use of a limited resource.
But now, having a fixed IP address is seen as another revenue stream by the ISPs. Which is crazy. I'm going be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm going to be using an IP address from that dynamic pool the entire time. That IP address will never be available for anyone else to use.
I can get around this by using a dynamic DNS service (which is what I'm already doing). But this seems crazy when my plan new will
require me to be online 24 hours a day. If I'm not online we won't have a working phone.
The up-shot? I won't be paying the extra $10/month, I'll continue to use my dynamic DNS service and I'll continue to consume a dynamic IP address never allowing it to be used by anyone else.
Update: It was suggested to me that this could be due to the
APNIC IPv4 Guidelines, but
APNIC classify DSL as a permanent connection, therefore static allocations are fine, in fact it appears that they expect organisations to use static IP addresses for DSL connections.
