On 4/25/2010 15:27, sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:
- Dynamic addresses is a way to differentiate residential customers (who pay less) from business customers (who pay more).
Which is both specious and obnoxious.
It is a business choice, which you may or may not agree with.
Given a choice between a provider which does this and one who does not, I will always choose the one that does not. Unfortunately, there is no PON vendor in my area, so I live with com cast business (on a dynamic IP because I refuse to pay their absurd mark-up on IP addresses). Given a PON vendor in my neighborhood, I'd drop Comcast in a heartbeat.
You can obviously vote with your wallet. In a market with rather thin margins, where most residential customers are happy with dynamic addresses, I find it entirely unsurprising that some companies would like to differentiate between customers this way.
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no
The whole idea that DHCP should only be used for (and is absolute proof of the status of) despised-class customers is just nuts. When I was a network administrator we were working to convert all hosts to DHCP to improve the service to everybody. There were some hosts that were not bright enough to use DHCP (I don't remember an example, but I do remember there were some), it seems like there were some where we decided it was a Bad Idea (see parenthetical material above), and some that were not under our administrative control who believed that to use DHCP was an admission of inferior status. We had a lot of hosts that got their "permanently assigned", "static" address via DHCP. The big benefits came from being able to change name-server addresses, default-gateway addresses (and even netmask settings although that turned out not to work as well as we had hoped due to poor planning on our part). And of course, shortening the lease-life when changes were pending was useful in the same way that changing DNS TTL is.
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