Original message <MAPI.Id.0016.00657465726420204333343130303138@MAPI.to.RFC822> From: Peter Dawe <peterd@dial.pipex.com> Date: Jan 28, 18:46 Subject: Static IP addresses for Dial-up

Demon Internet Services provide an IP address for every dial-up customer. Most other ISPs have taken the view that this is a waste of valuable IP space and allocate IP addresses dynamically.

How should our industry respond to ISPs who behave selfishly and do not take into account the good of the network?

The access-control argument has been beaten to death already. We offer our customers static IP addresses for some additional reasons: - ability to receive mail by SMTP instead of POP - ability to run a part time WWW or BBS service at a fixed address - support for systems that don't easily support dynamic addresses (some Unix machines with hand-coded dialup scripts) and most importantly - ability to do disconnect-and-redial without breaking connections, which is particularly useful with ISDN. You can telnet somewhere, get idled out of the ISDN server, hit return and your ISDN adapter auto-redials and connects and your packet goes through, and you're still on the same address so everything works. Customers on flakey dialup lines (28.8k from up in the mountains during bad weather) appreciate this too. -matthew kaufman matthew@scruz.net