After many years I decided to pull the trigger on getting a static IPv4 address. The biggest factor in the decision was my wife’s LLC. For Frontier Fiber here are the steps:
- Like many other ISPs, Frontier only gives out static IP on “business” grade connections. Without being negative, the first question you get when upgrading from a residential to a business connection is: “What’s the difference?” or “Is there a difference between a residential account and a business account?”. There may be a difference in service level but I can’t see it enumerated anywhere in the service agreements. For me the change was accomplished without changing any equipment. The important thing is that Frontier like Optimum and possibly Xfinity, will only give out static IP on a business account so you have to “upgrade”.
That was the first part of the process for me. I had to work with Frontier to convert my account from residential to business. From my perspective this looks like moving my file from one file cabinet to another. Further, when I called to manage the process, I always got a customer service rep who handled residential account so I had to wait to be connected to a rep that worked the “business” side of the house. - Once the work order was finished, I was able to setup an appointment to get my ONT reconfigured from residential/DHCP to business/static. The tech showed up this morning. Frontier truly does static IP. As I understand things, they do not use a BOOTP style process where your equipment can learn a static IP assignment via the protocol for DHCP. I wish they did that but they don’t. If I’m honest with myself, I have several servers that get their IP address via DHCP but the address they get is statically tied to a particular MAC address, BOOTP style. Honestly, I find that there are places on my network where this whole thing is brittle and I control the whole thing. It’s probably for the best that they force me to configure things statically.
That’s pretty much it. In my case, I had some cleanup work that had to be done on the account before conversion from residential to business and that delayed the process for me by a few days. But, so long as Frontier stays up, I expect to have the same IP address until I change ISPs. The Frontier techs where tremendously professional during this whole process, they deserve praise for the way this was handled.
I’ll write a future article about how I do ISP failover on OpenBSD one time. This change modifies that process.