DSL with no public access?

M

mark2326

Registered
DSL has recently come available in my area, claiming speeds of 1.5Mbps (downloads) 512Kbps Uploads. The last several years I've had a wireless ISP with a static IP, been getting around 400-500Kbps (Downloads) and 200-300 (uploads)
When inquiring about the DSL I asked if I could get a static IP. She didn't think so but someone would have to call me back.
I have a surveillance system I monitor and constantly log on to computers at home to backup smaller files from work. So a static IP would be great, but was willing to sacrifice it for faster speeds. So last night I wrote a script that would email myself, my IP every morning.
This morning shortly after I got my first "IP email" A tech from the DSL company called and said "no a static IP was not possible", and wanted to know why I wanted it. I explained why and that I had a work around for the issue.
He said it still won't work, that their IP's can not be recognized publicly (something to that effect). I asked "so if I had a computer hooked directly to the modem with web sharing on, and typed my IP in a browser i could not access my web page?" He replied "no"
I've never heard of anything like this.
My question is, has anyone else had this problem, or know how to work around it?
 
Who is providing this DSL service? I've never heard of a provider who didn't offer static IP, at least as an option.
 
I call "bull-hockey." DSL, by definition, has a public IP address readily available to the outside world. Whether that IP address changes or not periodically is dependent upon whether you have a static or dynamic IP address, as you seem to fully understand. You can tell your ISP that if you didn't have a standard dotted quad (ie, the IP addresses we all know and love), then you couldn't access anything on the internet, period. The internet requires you to have a unique IP address of some sort.

At any rate, you could do just fine with a dynamic IP address -- simply head on over to dyndns.org and sign up for a free account. Then, using simple software or a router that has dynamicDNS support, you could access your computer from the outside world via "something.dyndns.org" no matter what your IP address is (the software or dynamicDNS-supporting router constantly monitors your outside IP address and simply notifies dyndns.org when your IP address changes, and then updates your "something.dyndns.org" account with the new IP). I use it all the time with my dynamic IP DSL account and it works great.
 
Thanks for the reply ElDiabloConCaca, and the tip on using dyndns.org.
Yea "bull-hockey" is pretty close to what I was thinking when he was telling me this. Although he was adamant on what he was telling me, reiterating how this saves bandwidth on their system.
It will cost me $130 for early termination if what he's telling me is correct, thought I'd get some feedback before I tried to prove him wrong.
 
One possibility though is that they have you behind a big NAT (Network Address Translation) where everyone is sharing the same internet available IP. For instance at the office we have a couple hundred machines behind a NAT which makes them all look like the same IP to machines out in the internet. That is fine for random surfing activities but it really sucks for anything beyond that.
 
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