Re: Discussion of the Home/SOHO environment

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, james woodyatt wrote:

> + Customer gets one IPv4 address, possibly from RFC 1918 space, that may 
> change over time, sometimes several times per day.  (I know of one service 
> that changes my address six or seven times while I'm in transit between 
> Cupertino and San Francisco.)
I don't think this is something customers WANT. At a previous employer our 
ADSL offering consisted of a static IP address provisioned at deployment 
time with no dynamic what so ever.
This was appreciated by operational staff at the ISP (no servers involved 
in the function of getting IP packets flowing meant less outages and 
simpler service to fault isolate in case of trouble. Also no tools needed 
to find who had what IP at what time in case of abuse, IP/user correlation 
always the same) and by customers (we had customers that chose our service 
just because they got a static IP address). After a while we ended up 
giving out that static IP address via DHCP (same answer every time) as 
well just because we needed to provision VoIP service box.
So I would say that the changing of IP addresses is something ISPs have 
forced on customers and not something they choose themselves. It is my 
firm opinion that most customers want the same IP over time. Power users 
want it today, the majority will want it in the future (right now they 
don't care). As streaming devices etc are becoming more prevalent, I see 
users wanting to access their home devices from their mobile terminal for 
instance and this requires globally routed IPs.
ISPs not giving end customers the flexibility that is possible is going to 
have problems in markets where customers have a choice. I keep my ssh 
sessions running for days, so an ISP that changes my IP constantly is just 
simply unacceptable.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se