| From: Michael Galea via talk <talk@gtalug.org> I am puzzling over the same problems... | Hi, Bell notified me that they will soon be shutting down my copper telephone | service, no options. My DSL to TekSavvy will go with it. Joy. My neighbourhood got Bell Fiber to the Home (FTTH). I signed up but said I wanted to keep my copper too. They thought that that was odd but went ahead. I recently got a letter (bulk, I think) saying that copper service is being turned off in the neighbourhood (in March, I think). | I run my own NAT/mail/vpn server firewall and I want to keep it. I get DSL service from Vybe over copper. I have a static IP address. I run a mail server and a DNS server on it. I also have been assigned a /24 by ARIN (actually, before ARIN) and Vybe routes it to my home too. Bell can't give me a static IP address and they sure aren't going to route my /24 to my home. | Apparently, | others have been able connect to Bell by turning on PPPoE pass through on the | Bell (HH4000) modem. When I asked Vybe about what to do, they said PPPoE would work on the HH4000, but only in an "I heard that" kind of way. This seems very odd to me, for a few reasons. They actually said I could use my existing modem but that is nonsense since it connects to copper and the HH4000 provides ethernet. This shows the ignorance of the Vybe tech support person that I was talking to. Note: I don't blame him but I don't know where to turn for accurate information. Experimentation, partly. What I can do, in theory is throw away my modem and connect my gateway machine (which talked PPPoE to the modem) to the HH4000. But I don't want a big-bang cutover so I'll do it a little differently. I'm paying Vybe for a DSL connection at 25M, over copper. Vybe doesn't offer fibre. Bell doesn't let them resell it. So how can I pay them for service over copper after copper is gone? I could flood them at 1G with this connection. How can they be compensated for that amount of traffic? Remember, they have to pay their upstream provider for bandwidth; probably Bell too. I actually want two PPPoE connections: - to Bell, for the IP service I'm paying them for - to Vybe for my static IP address etc. But I don't think that the protocol allows you to have two PPPoE sessions over one ethernet. Why do I want Bell's IP address as well as my static address? - I'm paying Bell for bandwidth and I want to use Bell's bandwidth - apparently my in-house set-top-boxes (think Chrome Cast With Google TV (what a horrible name)) are only allowed access to TV because they come through the IP address assigned by Bell. This was told to me by a Bell sales person so it might be wrong, but it makes some sense. | Has anyone on the list gone this route? Is Bell still dreadful, even on fibre? | Am I crazy to look at Rogers? Rogers isn't going to give you a static IP address. My Rogers line changes IP address randomly but on average about once a year. But you cannot control the entry in the reverse domain for a Rogers address so it isn't very useful for an SMTP server. I don't know anything about Rogers business service. That should support a static IP address. But even third-party ISPs cannot offer static IPs over Rogers fabric, only over Bell's. Most of Rogers service is fast down, slow up. There are a very few places where Rogers has installed FTTH, and then it is faster down, fast up. With those exceptions, Bell FTTH is capable of much faster up than Rogers is. The two giants are leapfrogging each other, but at the speed of tectonic drift. I may be forced to move my mailserver out of my home. Something that I've avoided for about 35 years. | PS: I pay ~$40/Mo for landline, which looks to increase to $52 after the | change! Robbers! All these companies (by which I mean both -- it *is* a duopoly) offer great prices for bundles of services. Typically for two years at a time. You have to appear willing to switch to get good deals after then. I'm paying Bell $90 + tax for 1.5G down 9xxM up internet + "home phone" + Basic TV, including HH4000 modem and one "PVR" TV box [It isn't a PVR -- stuff is being stored somewhere in Bell's cloud). Note: Traditionally, Old fashioned copper landlines (POTS) had power supplied by big batteries in the Central office (CO). It even had enough to power a light in your Princess Phone. So your phone service continued through Hydro outages. Of course some events took out both networks. When Rogers started to offer landlines, they put UPSes in the nodes. They'd last for a few hours. After that, they deployed generators to keep the service going. I observed this because they did it across the street from our house during a long power blackout. Bell is giving me a phone service though the HH4000. The HH3000 had a UPS to handle phone service during Hydro outages. But the HH4000 does not include a UPS and the HH3000 isn't an option. I assume that I could put the HH4000 on my own UPS. For most people this doesn't actually matter since most landline handsets require mains power anyway. This is even true for me since we had to retire our NE500 sets when pulse dialing was yanked from our line. Somewhere in my junk-pile I have a touch-tone line-powered handset. In an emergency, most people will grab a mobile phone anyway. Until it runs out of battery.