[ale] State of play re home Internet with static IP

[Jeff Hubbs]

After many years at the status quo (AT&T UVerse and POTS land line) I'm 
finally looking into a rework of the home telecomm situation.

I have two main drivers that are forcing the decision:

 1. Even after the shortest of power outages, upstream UVerse service
    goes dead and stays dead for 10-20 minutes. This was not always the
    case but in the last few years it's been the "new normal;" my wife
    works at home via VPN enough that that's a problem, and it's no good
    for me either. Yes, I have UPSses out the wazoo on everything and it
    doesn't matter. I've tried to get through to AT&T by phone to at
    least get the problem acknowledged but that's been impossible.
 2. There's a good chance I might be leaving town for my next job for an
    unknown amount of time, but that won't mean that I'll stop being the
    "IT guy" for the house; I will simply *have* to be able to shell in
    from the outside. If there is such a thing as a "reflector" service
    that sits on the Internet - even if it's my own server somewhere -
    that gives me a way to tunnel in reverse through some kind of
    connection that's initiated from inside the house, I don't want to
    be dependent on it.

Being able to run my own Internet-reachable web and email servers in the 
house is anticipated but is secondary to those two main drivers.

It is my understanding that only AT&T and Comcast serve my street.

I've spoken to a rep for Comcast Business and they're telling me that 
within reason (with respect to affected region(s) and length of outage, 
I presume) their service will remain unaffected by power outage. That 
handles 1. above, and they also offer as few as one static IP address 
which should be sufficient to handle 2.

I have not yet called about any of AT&T's business residential offerings 
but when I got a flyer in the mail about some kind of fiber service 
being available in my neighborhood and called to inquire, I couldn't get 
anything even remotely like a straight answer but the upshot was that 
no, the fiber service wasn't available to me. I'm quite rather done with 
AT&T, to be honest.

Comcast says they can give me a VoIP-like service that can optionally 
use my old phone number. I'm undecided on that; the phone rings with 
random robocalls and other solicitations 3-5 times a day (Do Not Call 
list notwithstanding) and there are only 3 living persons whom we know 
who ever, *ever* call that line.

We would like to have a TV service with DVR available and it's my 
understanding from talking to Comcast that it would have to be Xfinity 
piggybacked on the Comcast Business service. It would be either that or 
satellite to still have DVR. I've never dealt with satellite service 
before but the houses to either side of us have it. I've built an HDTV 
antenna and mounted it in the attic but I haven't completed the cabling 
to know for sure how well it will work, and if we went that route, 
there'd be no DVR unless I went the whole MythTV (or equivalent) route 
and I'm really not willing to try that again.

I'm all (rabbit) ears, so let your replies rip.

- Jeff

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