[WXC/VFX] Static IP charging

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › [WXC/VFX] Static IP charging

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Exited
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#100701 18-Dec-2007 17:47

Its much easier just to chuck an IP range at a group of users than it is to manually set each one up, one by one...

Also because you have users coming and leaving all the time, it would be an administrative headache if you didn't have a system to release and reserve IP's...

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dan

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#100705 18-Dec-2007 18:00

yes Orcon provide a static ip FREE on every account except "Zeroshock Flat Rate".

PenultimateHop

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#100706 18-Dec-2007 18:02

thekiwi:
Sorry I cant see the point of those last two above.

ADSL is service which is permanently connected. If they have 250 ADSL Customers they WILL NEED 250 IP addresses reserved for those addresses, cause unlike dialup they have to assume that all of their customers will be connected all of the time. Thus there is no needless Address waste and they have to provide you an address all the time no matter what.

They wont have their requests rejected for as above, ADSL is a 24 hr service.

Not quite correct. I certainly see a 10-15% churn in DSL port consumption over a 24 hour period, due to:

- Backhoe fade
- Subscribers with internal modems (quite a high proportion)
- Subscribers who turn their DSL modem off for whatever reason - in some cases I suspect this is related to 'bill shock'
- Subscribers who are provisioned but have not yet turned their service up

There is certainly a stat mux beyond 1:1 in provisioning DSL services.

APNIC-105 section 6.1, 6.2, 10.1, and 10.2 are relevant here in that:

DSL may be considered transient or permanent
- But even if it's considered permanent, you may be asked to justify your use of static addressing rather than dynamic (6.2 second para).
- If you consider it a transient service, then you need to provide full technical justification of the static assignment (6.1 para 2).
10.1 and 10.2 provide for service bootstrap and subsequent assignments, which may require the requestor to provide information that would show flux in subscribers, thus most likely showing a flux in subscribers.

Given the impending doom (heh) of IPv4, and the fact that 1 subscriber does NOT equal one nailed up connection on xDSL, I would expect to see the RIRs giving greater scrutiny to those who provide a static IP address by default to subscribers. It is abnormal and as your sub count increases, does not equal active connections. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some ISPs engaging in this practice went back and moved to dynamic IPs; or started to have issues with gaining additional IPv4 resource without significant justification in their practices - and I would struggle to see the justification for it.

PenultimateHop

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#100709 18-Dec-2007 18:11

Also, ignoring the static IP justification issue with the RIR, it poses some interesting design constraints in a network.

Suppose I have 200,000 DSL subscribers. Suppose I'm using BRAS that support 32000 subscribers per BRAS - a fairly typical amount. This means I need 7 BRAS to meet this need, excluding any geographical constraints, redundancy requirements, or bandwidth /forwarding constraints.

For arguments sake, we'll assume that our BRAS are connected via an MPLS IP-VPN (RFC4364), and are distributed in some manner around the country.

In order to support static IP addressing within your IP-VPN, you now have to carry a /32 prefix for every single subscriber in your network, because you can't announce summary prefixes from your BRAS. You will need to do this because:

Subscribers move house
DSLAMs are rearranged in your (or the access) network
Subscribers use their username at someone else's house

This means you are injecting (at peak) 200k /32 prefixes into your IP-VPN. This affects scaling on your IBGP route reflectors; your PEs; and your BRAS (assuming they are not PE devices themselves). Given that many of your devices may also be taking a full Internet route table (~245K prefixes), you are now carrying 545K prefixes - far beyond the scalability of many low end MPLS routers (e.g. Juniper M5/M10; Cisco 6500/7200/7500/7600 with non XL PFC; M20/M40/M160 without SFM memory upgrades; etc).

So looking at it from an outright network engineering perspective, it's far more wasteful and annoying to have to work with than using easily aggretable IP pools for the majority of subscribers and assigning statics on an exception basis, which can then be injected into your IP-VPN as more specifics.

Of course, there are ways to work around this, but it requires extensive BSS platform work; intelligence in the BRAS/PE router; or an additional hierarchy of routers, which adds significant cost to the network build.

Static IPs provide even more issues in a TR-101 environment.

hads

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#100711 18-Dec-2007 18:17

All the DSL network background is interesting, but, quite OT for this thread. As far as WXC and this thread are concerned we were referring to static IPs being an applied for exception. The question itself being, why did they start charging and will this charging be applied to customers who already have a static IP allocated.

I'd hate to not get an answer to the question from one of the WXC employees because of all the noise.

hads

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grant_k

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#100713 18-Dec-2007 18:23

PenultimateHop: Also, ignoring the static IP justification issue with the RIR, it poses some interesting design constraints in a network...

Thanks for taking the time to write that lengthy explanation PenultimateHop

I for one was interested to read it as it raised some thought-provoking issues. Not that I would pretend to understand every bit of your explanation, but definitely worth reading nonetheless.

It certainly rebuffs the notion that provision of Static IPs is a zero-cost exercise to an ISP.

Cheers,
Grant.

grant_k

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#100716 18-Dec-2007 18:24

hads: I'd hate to not get an answer to the question from one of the WXC employees because of all the noise.

Yes, I would like to get an answer too because I have had a Static IP for almost a year now.

Perhaps it would be best to send Maverick or Wendy a PM if we don't get an answer by tomorrow?

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maverick

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#100718 18-Dec-2007 18:54

I have been away for the last 2 days on a field trip

so slow on the replies had a 5 minute window this morning to answer a couple of queries but nothing in detail so not ducking the hard questions Hads

this deserved a decent reply, btw Queenstown was really nice today, as for this one as we have said sometimes we can't please everyone, as this will probably fall into one of those caterogys, intially we didn't enforce charges for static IP's even though it was there, but it has got to a level where it does impact on us so at this stage we will charge for static IP's, we know it will not please everyone but we do have cost's involved with this and there will be occassion on some products where will charge and otheres will not and vise versa, case in point VOIP traffic is free with us, others charge for it and I don't hear anyone saying that we should charge just like the others

, but the bottom line is we still have to cover costs and this is one area where it has been decided that this will happen.

Phil Moore
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grant_k

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#100722 18-Dec-2007 19:04

maverick: ...the bottom line is we still have to cover costs and this is one area where it has been decided that this will happen.

Cheers for that Phil. Probably not what we wanted to hear, but at least we know where we stand.

I will look at switching my router to use a DynDNS account as I have been impressed with how well it works on Xtencity. A Static IP was just the easiest option -- especially as it didn't cost any extra until now -- but I take your point that there are costs involved, so will look to minimise the impact of those on my account.

Detruire

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#100723 18-Dec-2007 19:06

Are they still free for those who already have them?

rm *

Niel

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#100727 18-Dec-2007 19:20

Detruire: Are they still free for those who already have them?

...and if not, how much notice to allow us to make other arrangements? So far I have only heared about it on this forum, no official notice from WxC. Thanks.

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maverick

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WorldxChange

#100728 18-Dec-2007 19:22

Detruire: Are they still free for those who already have them?

Yes correct at this point, we would expect to give notice to people if we changed our mind of course

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

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hads

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#100734 18-Dec-2007 19:59

Thanks for the reply maverick, I didn't think you were ducking the question.

It's a bummer that WXC have started charging for a static IP, lucky I get free static IP and RDNS here :)

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Fraktul

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#100740 18-Dec-2007 20:13

If you provide statics with restrictions round them (end user moving, not able to be used on another line, best efforts etc) then you could use prefix summarys and have a sane amount of routes in your routing tables again.

As explained in quite a bit of detail there is good reason why static IPs are a valid "value add" service. I have the same problem with people asking me why statics are chargable.

deadlyllama

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#104849 14-Jan-2008 21:35

Fraktul: If you provide statics with restrictions round them (end user moving, not able to be used on another line, best efforts etc) then you could use prefix summarys and have a sane amount of routes in your routing tables again.

As explained in quite a bit of detail there is good reason why static IPs are a valid "value add" service. I have the same problem with people asking me why statics are chargable.

A "best effort" static IP is useless if you want to add it to configuration files, use it as an ipv6 tunnel endpoint, run a mailserver/webserver behind it. But if you're not doing stuff like that I can't see what advantage a static IP would bring.

I can see why static IPs make network design more annoying, but not how this works out to $10/user/mo of annoyance, unless there's a high correlation between people who request static IPs and people who are a PITA for other reasons (abuse complaints, helpdesk calls, etc).

Or maybe I've just been spoilt by having had Paradise/TelstraClear cable since 1999, which has never had a dynamic IP option (ignoring the short-lived experiment that was chello).

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