Business class ISPs not ready for prime time
Update – Verizon FiOS, sometimes the “wrong way” is the right way
Over the last few years, a lot of consumer grade broadband technology has been marketed to businesses. Usually the ISP will call it “Business Class” or something like that, and charge a big markup. To justify the markup, they will do something like add a pittance of an SLA (like promising an onsite tech dispatch in 4 business hours), or maybe some guaranteed bandwidth, or possibly offer blocks of static IP addreses.
The problem is, these companies really do not understand what businesses need, even if the company owns another division that provisions T1 lines or other business class services. These companies create their “business class” offiering by having a seperate support number for those customers and putting some annotations on the contract, but the process is still based out of the consumer grade stuff.
Instead, these companies need to flip the equation around. Instead of trying to backport some of the process from the “enterprise class” groups to the consumer groups, they need to bring the consumer technologies into the mix that the “enterprise class” groups support and provision. Period. The fact is, with the way that the consumer grade groups approach things like customer satisfaction, cost cutting, customer service, technical support, etc. is not what businesses will tolerate.
Right now, I am having major problems with not one but two such companies. Verizon’s “Business Class FiOS” does not “get” the idea that customers with a block of static IP addresses do not want to just NAT everything behind their $50 router, they actually want to provide routing with a real device (in this case, a Cisco 1841 router). Time Warner’s “Business Class RoadRunner” service is simply falling all over itself over the fact that I moved… and every time I move, the way they handle things gets worse, not better.
These technologies should be creaming the established T1 and T3 providers. They cost a fraction of the price with just as much uptime and more bandwidth. But until these companies get their acts together in terms of how they handle customers, they will never be “business class” enough to capture huge amounts of true business customers, beyond small offices without dedicated IT staff.
J.Ja
"Right now, I am having major problems with not one but two such companies. Verizon’s "Business Class FiOS" does not "get" the idea that customers with a block of static IP addresses do not want to just NAT everything behind their $50 router"
Can Verizon change their IP scheme upon request? They generally put you on those $50 routers because it’s cookie cutter for them and they know that device will always work. However, it’s probably possible to change that router to pass on that IP block if you ask them to.
No one at Verizon acknowledges that anyone would want to do anything other than NAT the whole block to internal private IPs. This is a great example of what I’m talking about. Many enterprises want to put their public IPs inside their router and not just NAT, so for Verizon to not readily support that is insane.
J.Ja
All they gotta do is use up 4 more public IP addresses for the point-to-point interface and they can give you that whole block. They can also use a transparent layer 2 router device that will basically do IP passthrough and that will save on some IP addresses.
Yup, I know that’s all they need to do, that’s what a lot of T1 people do, if they aren’t using a private IP on frame relay… but it’s a problem of them trying to bolt on the phrase "business class" on top of a consumer division, instead of selling a traditional consumer technology through the true business division. I’ve worked with Verizon on T1s, always was very happy with them.
J.Ja
But are they willing to change the FiOS business link such that you can use the block of public IPs behind their device? I don’t think it’s a question of which division handles it; I think they just need to improve the current process.
So far, no. A HUGE part of the problem is that their device (what I’d call a CSU/DSU on a T1, or a cable modem on a cable line) has one of our public IPs assigned to it, from what I can tell, and may (or may not, hard to say) be designed to pass traffic destined for that public IP back to whatever is behind it. At the end of the day, they’ve done something really collossally dumb. We’re assigned 70.x.x.65 – 70.x.x.126 as our public IPs. But the gateway we’re supposed to be talking to is 70.x.x.1, all with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. That means that other customers may get addresses of 70.x.x.2 – 70.x.x.63, and 70.x.x.128 – 70.x.x.254, and still be within the same logical network.
What we’ve tried most recently is to assign 70.x.x.2 (subnet 255.255.255.252) to the external interface of the router, and put 70.x.x.126 (subnet 255.255.255.192) on the internal interface of the router. This makes the source address of traffic always 70.x.x.64 – 70.x.x.126 (except for traffic originating from the router itself, which uses 70.x.x.2, which Verizon won’t route to us), and it *sometimes* works, but then it stops. I am not sure if the problem is an ARP issue with Verizon, or something else. But the fact that I’ve even considered this says bad things. My other option is to double-NAT… once from the routers to its internal interface (the "sandbox"), and once from the ISA server to the DMZ… which would be a real messy "solution" at best.
J.Ja
We spent nearly 90 minutes on the phone with them tonight, they don’t even understand the simple questions we are asking them. At this point, I am ready to just plug the FiOS line into a $30 switch (so devices that are not supposed to be behind the firewall can get to it too), plus the ISA firewall into the switch, dump the T1 backup line, and get a DSL or cable modem line with 64 static IPs for the redundancy, and just have 2 default gateways with a lower metric for FiOS on the ISA box. Between me and "the boss", we’re burning 40 – 50 hours per week on this issue now. The development of our next version of our product has been delayed by nearly a month now because of it, all of my other projects have been on hold, including the eStore that is critical for a major deal we are working on, getting a SAN in replace, virtualization of existing physical servers, getting rid of the NT 4 server & domain, etc….
J.Ja
I have Business Class Optimum Online. Not only is it the same price as their Residential but i can get it in a residential location without even having a business license. Very nice service i have the 30/5 solid most of the time. Free cisco router (851) and 5 static IP’s WITH reverse dns. Now they even give me UPS backup free of charge. You can’t go wrong with it.
My speedtest image is on the forums.
http://www.optimum.com/business/ool/static.jsp
I had fairly good luck with Time Warner Business Class cable in a similar configuration. Indeed, my home is currently on TWC B. Class with a static IP and Reverse DNS. But the configuration still isn’t good enough for the enterprise, simply because I *must* put the public IPs on the outside of my router and NAT to the inside, which is not good enough for a big company with more than a few static, public IPs.
J.Ja
I see where you’re coming from where you don’t want to NAT anything. I currently do NAT everything and i just map out External IP’s to Internal IP’s through Routing and Remote Access. I only have 5 static IP’s but im wishing i had more. Although they gave me a cisco 851 which i HAVE to use cause its the default gateway(my IP’s 96.X.X.146 – 96.X.X.150) the router’s IP is .145 which is what needs to be used as a default gateway. Unfournatly i do not have any admin access to the 851 but i can plug in multiple divices and pull static IP’s. But i found it nicer to just NAT everything so i can have some of my servers internal only(server for DHCP,DNS,IAS,File Sharing, AD).
Talk about expensive.
![]("http://www.speedtest.net/result/273920710.png"/)
http://www.twcbc.com/nyc/products/data/broadbandhighspeeddata/internetaccess.html
I get 30/5 for 54.95 with static IP’s. I posted a speedtest of my connection in the form. But its decent. *does a speed test now*
pretty much dead on.
I’m going to have to talk to TWCBC ASAP. I used them for my home office, I’m paying $94.90/month for 1up/2 down + 1 static IP, which 4 years ago was a good deal, but obviously they have better deals now.
J.Ja
I work for Verizon and you’re right, the service on "business" accounts is almost identical to residential accounts physically. however, business accounts do have some perks for the extra $20 (or so) ..
Anyway, Any questions? I’ve got all sorts of answers about a lot of things to do with Verizon. verizonrelated@gmail.com
Although it is a bit counter-intuitive, there is a really easy solution to the problem of the Verizon static IP block, and assigning IP addresses contained within your block to other hosts in your network that are “behind” your router.
I’m assuming there is an “internal” network which uses non-routable (10, 192.168, etc.) IP addresses, and there are at least 2 interfaces on the router machine.
I’m using a FreeBSD box as my router.
Assign all 5 IP addresses in the Verizon IP block to the interface on your router that is connected to the DSL modem. Then set up static routes for the IPs that you have assigned to other hosts, pointing to the internal IP address of the host that is assigned to the static IP you want to use.
Example: Verizon gives you 5 static IPs – 72.84.244.74 to .78. In this example, I will use 10.10.10.0/24 for my internal network. You want 72.84.244.76 assigned to another host machine located “behind” your router (FreeBSD box in this case).
Interface RL0 is my “external” interface, and interface XL0 is my “internal” interface.
IPs:
72.84.244.74 – .78 are assigned to RL0 on the router machine.
10.10.10.1 is assigned to XL0 (my “internal” interface. on the router machine)
10.10.10.5 and 72.84.244.76 are assigned to the other machine’s interface (I’m assuming only one interface on the other machine – you could use more than one).
At the router box, enter a static route to 72.84.244.76 with 10.10.10.5 as the gateway (route add 72.94.244.76 10.10.10.5).
At the “other” machine, you may need a static route back to the router machine (route add 72.84.244.74 10.10.10.1), but this may not be absolutely necessary. Your “other” machine will assume that all addresses in the 72.84.244 network are on its lan unless otherwise specified using static routes. The default gateway on the “other” machine is set as 10.0.0.1 (your router).
Anyway, that’s how I was able to solve the problem on my network.