[PLUG-TALK] TelCo Rant

[Rich Shepard]

   The supposed benefits of having a 'regulated' monopoly for wired telephone
service escape me. I wish we had choices like we do with wireless telephone
providers (despite the attempts of the big ones to eat the competition by
buying them and reducing choices there, too).

   Ever since Frontier Communications switched me from a static DSL IP address
to dynamic ones, they've certainly proven the dynamicism of the address.
Every two nights for the past 9 days the telco has changed my IP address.
They started gently at one change per night, then moved to 2 changes per
night. Last night they set a personal best: once per hour from midnight
through 6:00 am. Yep, 7 times. So much for stable addresses unless there's a
power disruption to the DSL bridge or router. Here's the log of changes since
last Sunday (I wasn't logging changes from the prior Wednesday through
Saturday):

50.43.7.110
50.43.7.173
50.43.7.206
50.43.7.150
50.43.7.199
50.43.7.224
50.43.7.252
50.43.7.27
50.43.7.42
50.43.7.63
50.43.7.73

   Appl-ecosys.com was still at .206 this morning; twodogs.us apparently
changed each hour and was .73 when I checked.

   This would be mildly annoying and amusing in the way so much large
corporation mis-management is amusing except that the script that's supposed
to detect the changes and update the addresses on namecheap.com's DNS
servers works only for one of my two domains: the second call to curl() in
the script. I've no idea why this happens.

   Last Wednesday I filed a high priority help ticket with namecheap's tech
support asking for their assistance in determining why the IP address for
appl-ecosys.com is not working despite generating a new Dynamic DNS password
and using that in the script. No response from them. More good service ...
not!

   I switched the two lines in the script that call curl() to update the IP
addresses. I'll see Sunday morning what happens when Frontier changes my IP
address once (or more) Saturday night. If the simple, 11-line script (thanks
to Bill Barry) still doesn't work for my business domain name change, I'll
bite the bullet and pay a higher monthly fee to DSL-only to get the
stability of a static IP address with Frontier.

   This is highly annoying and a disruption I would just as soon do without.

Rich