On Mar 19, 2011, at 9:46 AM, Jeff Wheeler wrote:
On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Nathan Eisenberg <nathan@atlasnetworks.us> wrote:
As for charging for residential static assignments, I don't think it's all that odd, or 'despicable'. Allocating static assignments consumes engineer time for configuration and documentation. On a business class service, you can eat that cost fairly easily. On a low-yield residential circuit, there has to be some long term ROI because that work probably takes the margin out of the service for months.
"Engineer time" is not an issue. If it requires an "engineer" for "configuration" and "documentation," the provisioning process is already flawed. The reason to not want residential users to have static IPs is that these users represent large chunks of traffic which can be easily moved from one group of HFC channels to another when additional capacity must be created by breaking up access network segments. If many users had a static IP, this would be more difficult. Since most users don't have a static IP, the overhead of dealing with the few users who do is entirely manageable, especially when these users are paying a higher fee.
This assumes an HFC network and not a PON or DSL topology where it is not an issue. Owen