Shaw SOHO Xtreme-I With Two Static IPs

Ten days ago I upgraded our Shaw residential internet to a business account: SOHO Xtreme-I with a pair of static IP addresses. We’d been having frequent internet outages, probably because we had an old Motorola CyberSURFR Wave cablemodem. The symptoms: I would be unable to ping the gateway address, I’d check the modem and the ‘cable’ light would be flashing. I’d call Shaw’s residential tech support and they’d begin asking really stupid questions. “Do you have a router?” “What kind of operating system do you use?” “How many computers are connected?” Trying to explain that the flashing ‘cable’ light meant there was a problem between the modem and Shaw’s infrastructure was an exercise in futility. After a few minutes or a few hours of interruption, the CyberSURFR would once again begin talking to the internet at large. So I did two things:

1. Went to Shaw’s retail outlet and exchanged the CyberSURFR with a Motorola DOCSIS SURFBoard (SB5101);
2. Upgraded to a business account.

The former put us on a newer network – I suspect the CyberSURFR network is old and crufty, and likely that’s the reason for the frequent outages. The latter allows us to talk to semi-intelligent tech support people. By upgrading from the base SOHO to Xtreme-I we get a theoretical 1 Mbps upload speed, which is good for Personal Thyme. Last week I phoned Shaw’s business tech support and asked them to update the reverse DNS for my static IP so it pointed back at dmurray.ca. The tech actually understood what I was saying – don’t try that with the residential techs. After 10 days we’ve had no downtime at all. I’m pretty happy with this so far.