My time with Goscomb Technologies as my ISP is coming to an end. It’s partially their fault, but mainly BT OpenReach.
I’m FTTC connected and I get 14mbs down 0.2mbs up … on a good day. When I took this service up 3 years ago it was sufficient … but now it’s now. So what’s changed? Well, my site is getting more traffic (yay!) and I have more devices network connected. Also, my family is abusing the network more as well. I am also having been an Amazon Prime subscriber for a year now.
So BT can’t improve it in 3 years. But I need something, so kaboosh, lets look elsewhere. Goscomb technical support while initially good is just simply shocking now they’ve been bought out by hSo group. They don’t actually use their ticket tracker and when I phone up they say file a ticket. Explain patentiently I did … you get the idea. Coupled with the fact their IPv4 service has been exceptional, but their IPv6 service has been getting very spotty (and IPv6 was one of the sole reasons for using them) it’s time to look elsewhere again. Also, I’m maxing my download cap and it’s getting annoying and the next tier up is quite pricey…
So where to?
For better or for worse, I will be getting a Virgin Media Vivid Gamer 200 cable connection installed on Saturday. 200mbs down, 20mbs up, no traffic management. Wow! The up is better than my down ever was! Unlimited downloads sounds sexy too. The new deal is cheaper by £22 per month compared with the BT and Goscomb combo too boot. So what’s the catch?
Well, I can’t use the Virgin Media Business account. They can’t get a static IP address working on their business modem in modem mode. At all. Also, there are reports of their static IP service being dog slow and when they change to dynamic the speed gets back up. Both of these are deal breaks for me … I need it in modem mode as I run my own network. I’m moving to them for the speed, not the slowness and network dropouts. Apparently this is because the static IP is a GRE tunnel over the residential service.
So this means no more 100% self hosting … I need a static IP address to send mail from. So my solution is to rent a VPS for £3 a month to act as my public nameserver and email gateway. This is now setup … and in operation! It was fairly challenging, but the added bonus is that a lot more spam doesn’t hit my homenetwork as it’s blocked by spamhaus and postgrey. Even if it gets past that, it still has to defeat spamassassin on my mail mailserver, which is still hosted at home. It also means no more IPv6 … but I will investigate a Hurricane Electric IPv6 Tunnel. I’ve used them before and it as good but slow … hopefully it will be useable on the new cable! Virgin Media claim to be rolling out IPv6 mid 2017 but I’m not counting on that (but it would be nice).
Anyway, I think I’ve got everything ready to be upgraded now and I’m quite exited!