I received my new Internet connecting hardware in the mail today. Inside it says that the service won't be available until after 5PM today, and suggests I wait to connect it until after that. I'll wait, probably until tomorrow night or Saturday or whenever I get more than a few hours to get this configured.

We've been long-time customers of Comcast, from a merger with Time Warner before that. The service has been good, the speed usually pretty regular. The speed does sometimes seem to slow about the time we get a flurry of upgrade offers in the mail.

I'm tentative, but after much consideration I decided to give Century Link a whirl. They've recently brought fiber optic into the neighborhood, although it isn't fiber to the home. They promise consistent 40/20Mb per second, which is about double/quad what I get now. The rep at the door didn't know anything about static IPs, except to say that I'd need to get the service running and ask about that after.

I'm a little ambivolent about the fiber not reaching the house. Really, then, it's just DSL, and they're advertising their infrastructure more than anything I can directly use. Fundamentally I've got nothing wrong with DSL, having considered adding it to my ISP when I owned and ran it. Fiber to the premisis would be much better, in my opinion, especially if packaged with 100s of MB or even GB networking.

Still, the pledge is for double the speed in (and four times out, which is more important to me than to some), for about half the dollars, even when I add static IP. The rep didn't know anything about IPv6, and didn't believe they had any service restrictions (I run web and mail servers, like the one serving this blog) or bandwidth limits; I have Comcast's business-class service to avoid those features and to get a bigger-than-one block of static IP.

It's been more than 10 years since we've had a land-line into the house. Technically the wires are there, terminating at a POTS connector in the basement. I'm hopeful, but not certain that it should work and that plugging in the modem will be good enough. We'll know soon enough.

The plan is to get the new modem/router installed and disable its WiFi (I've got a better new WiFi and don't need the interference). I'm guessing that the router is going to NAT and give me private IPs anyway, so it should be something I can configure neatly to sit beside my other router and just be a gateway on the LAN. Then I can do side-by-side ('though with an extra switch hop to the new router from the old one...from the POTS through the router into the switch in the basement, and then to the WiFi/switch in the office) comparison for speed just by changing my static IP gateway (should work...sigh...).

Once the network is running, I'll give them a call to arrange for static IPs. Once they're added and configured, I'll start making chnages to the network, servers, and routers to try and move everything from the old IPs, including my IPv6 tunnels. After propagation, it should be the case that all of the traffic to the servers would go through the new IPs and not the old, and then I can terminate my Comcast; until that happens, I've got to run both.

The loss of static IPs and general deviation from the speed will be deal breakers and if either doesn't pan out I'll be kicking the modem back to them and cancelling the service. Or if it's too hard to get the POTS/DSL line working. I'm lazy and don't want to tinker with it too much, especially if it involves waiting for a service call to get a guy to try to fix that POTS connector.

This'll be a test of their service, in more than speed, too, because if their customer service is such that I can't get the IPs working before reaching the "customer satisfaction" early termination that gets me out of their contract (I'm not carrying them for a year if they suck in the first 30 days...), I'm terminating for that.

The clock is ticking.

Edit: That didn't take long. No sooner did I post this than the doorbell rang. The Century Link guy was done checking the lines on the outside of the house and wanted to take a moment to test from the inside. He checked the two existing outlets and found that both are delivering the 40/5Mb service I ordered. I tried correcting "20?" but he said "nope, says here 5." We'll see when I call about the static IPs. I'm going to take some minutes and get the router plugged in and working.