In my continuing (albeit slow) effort to move my Internet services to high(er) speed with static service, I've arranged for business service and a block of static IPs from my new provider.

I've successfully switched from Quantum Fiber to US Internet Fiber for gigabit service, with a static IP and IPv6 (via a tunnel).

In case you haven't checked other posts, I've got my static IP service still on Century Link's 100MB DSL service. It's very reliable, but it's also very asynchronous. I get much closer to 100MB in and a quarter or less than that out. Here's an example from just a moment ago, from the server connected directly to the CenturyLink router:

> curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py | python3 -
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
<stdin>:960: DeprecationWarning: datetime.datetime.utcnow() is deprecated and scheduled for removal in a future version. Use timezone-aware objects to represent datetimes in UTC: datetime.datetime.now(datetime.UTC).
Testing from CenturyLink (<<SNIP>>)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Lumen Technologies (St. Paul, MN) [10.25 km]: 25.211 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 89.82 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 11.30 Mbit/s

Clearly, that's not full speed in or out. Still "fast" internet, but not what I want to make available, even if these websites are not heavily trafficked or significant to many.

The Century Link gigabit service, marketed as Quantum Fiber, is very fast, consistently getting close to gigabit in and out, with speeds of 943Mbps download and 938Mbps upload, the last time I tested just before replacing it with the USI fiber. The problem with Quantum was their broken promise of static IP and IPv6 (direct, via 6rd), which they fairly offered as "same company, same services," right?

The USI service isn't as fast as I'd like, consistently coming in around 630Mbps download and 930Mbps upload, but they do also offer 2.5Gbps and 10Gbps services, should I find the 30x improvement over what I'm serving over DSL isn't cutting it. I think I'll be fine.

USI has been great to deal with, and addressed my asks very quickly. They say on their site that they only offer static IPs on business service, but the sales rep said "sure, we can do static IP on residential, too." Unfortunately, they only give one address. Technically, they offer a /30 block, which is 4 addresses, but one is the definition, one the broadcast, and two are usable; but those are the "far" side and "near" side of the router connection, so I only get the one IP.

I hoped to work around this with port mapping and reverse proxies on my servers, but that really only works for web servers, and not the mail servers. They also block SMTP and other ports for residential service that I need (or want, but should offload somewhere). Their business service doesn't block those ports (after checking your MTA for open relay, which mine doesn't do), and offers larger blocks of IPs. So they've switched me to business and are selling me another /29 (8 IPs, 6 usable including the router).

I poked around my WiFi router's settings to try to have it route the new block of addresses separately from the NAT LAN and WiFi it serves, but it turns out that the Pro version could do it, but my non-Pro version can't. It can either route the public network or the private NAT, but it doesn't have the VLAN or other routing tools to do both. I did find some scripts to configure the network on the device to do what is needed, but there's always the risk that the web GUI or other scripts will unintentionally overwrite or conflict with those settings. So I considered spending $300 for the Pro version (and downgrade the one I have to a mesh node), or more for a newer, more advanced router.

Instead, I dropped $50 for a wired router that supports up to 4 GB WAN ports. For another $100 or so I could have gotten their version that has a couple 2.5GB WAN ports, but since I'm not committed to faster speeds yet, and I might jump to 10GB when I do, I decided this isn't the time to push that envelope.

I'm still waiting to get the allocated network, but expect it later today. I'll configure the new router, inject it before the current router, readdressing the current router on the new subnet. Assuming that works, I'll start connecting the new router to the servers with new addresses, and start jumping through those multi-path configurations again. After they all work, I'll tinker with DNS and get the traffic going through the USI connection, and should see the DSL traffic hit near zero (I anticipate some from-server traffic while I work on routing and service binding).

Then I'll cancel the Century Link services and start watching for the time I need to upgrade the router and speeds.