I'm moving in town again, and this time, to a townhome (which is classified as a single family unit, and although I don't know how many pairs are going to it, I can see the NID/demarc on the front of the unit) which is fairly close to the DSLAM. When looking at the business site, CenturyLink qualifies it for 40/20, 60/30, 80/40, and 100/12. I see there's another thread about 40/20 right now, but I have a few thoughts and questions, so I figured I wouldn't clog up that thread.
This may not be something somebody here has done before, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask anyway. I successfully moved my static IP, PPPoE account, and whole connection in town before, but given that it looks like bonding is available at that address, I was wondering if it maybe wasn't worth the effort and added expense on my part to use this move (and the physical move of all of my equipment, etc) as an opportunity to go to small business service, either "Office Internet" or CoreConnect. (The main difference between those two services is that you get a voice line with CoreConnect, and I think that CL uses the attach rate for that service as an incentive, and as such, lowers the price of the overall service a bit.)
Right now, I'm paying about $45/mo for 1536/896 kilobits (T1 fed remote DSLAM, my stats are beautiful but the T1s get in the way of anything better) and I don't have voice service. I have one static IP, and I've been told previously that I can't take that particular IP (or my PPPoE login) with me when I move to a business account, so I'm preparing for that particular effort.
If I stick with residential, I believe it will be about $35/mo for a year ("new customer" bonus) and probably somewhere between $76-95 or so after that.
If I go with "Office Internet" 40/20 is $152, and all of the bonded tiers are simply too expensive for me to look at. (My ultimate hope is that CL will bring the cost on pair bonding down.)
If I switch to Internet+Phone ("CoreConnect"), it looks like I'm looking at about $125/mo, plus local fees.
I've attached an old pricing list. It looks like that's about accurate still, but of course everything has been increased by $2/mo since I made the it. They include Office365 Essentials, but there's no mention of how many users you get.
(Sidenote: The cable company in town doesn't known the meaning of the word "reliability" and their pricing is still insane, as indicated in the post I linked above, so they are essentially off the table for me.)
Static IP pricing for my area is here: http://internethelp.centurylink.com/internethelp/static-ordering-q.html -- it may be worth moving to five IPs so I can do neat things like run my SharePoint and Exchange servers on separate IPs without having to deal with reverse proxying. One IP is about $6/mo and eight (five usable) is about $15.
So I guess the main question is: would you bother switching over to business up front or do you think I can get what I need on residential for a while? I have run up against the 150GB download quota on my 1.5M connection, so I have no problems thinking I'll easily run up against a 250GB quota with 40M down. (The vast majority of my use will probably be uploads, and those aren't counted on CL's residential quotas.)
Given that this is going to be a single pair install at first, I'll probably just use my existing Q1000 or bridge the C1000 I have on hand. One thing that would be interesting to hear is if anybody has experience using multiple static IPs on CenturyLink service, either with CL's gateway or bridged to their own router. (I have a router but would be open to buying a new one.)
Also, has anybody heard about whether or not CL over-provisions single pair business installs? Going from 40M to 50M is almost certainly a given with how close the DSLAM is, but I'm also unlikely to drop back down to residential class service just to get the over-provisioning.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
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