Those of you attempting to listen to Artisan Radio the past week or so would have been out of luck. I was away, and it appears as if my ISP was doing some maintenance work and changed my static IP! I just got back and have updated my DNS information to reflect the new 'static' IP, so everything is back up again.
Turns out they don't guarantee that the IP doesn't ever change. It just changes much less frequently than dynamic ones.
They should have let you know.
A cable system is like a giant tree that spreads out in all directions with customers way out on the tips of the branches. What a gigantic technical mega-structure it is.
It no doubt takes intense attention to detail to keep a cable system running smoothly. It's something most people cannot envision, but with our technical awareness we can comprehend the size of it.
When I had DSL, a related and very cumbersome technology, the quality was immensly unreliable and the service provided by the phone company was slip-shod and lacking,
Out of desparation I risked cable, about which I'd heard some tales of shabby performance, but luckily for me the cable has been immensly reliable and constant.
Over the course of time the general state of the art of cable/telephone service seems to vary, one customer lucks out, another gets short-changed.
Complaints get shunted into a dummy load.
For Internet in Elizabeth City, NC Time Warner is lackluster at best. The net is fast (When it works right which you can count on drop outs around noon). I'd be doing a Radio show and all of a sudden the upload drops down and my software goes crazy because it can't send data fast enough due to a sudden slow down in the upload speed. Listeners would suffer from my station cutting in and out or if it got so bad it would switch to AutoDJ right in the middle of a song. Calling to complain did little to no good and now I'm on CenturyLink DSL. I don't get as many cut outs (So Far) but the Download is 40Mbps and 5mbps Upload. Streaming at 128K to my server elsewhere is not a chore so it seems and I can honestly carry a Radio show without having to fall back to tethering. With Time Warner I'd have to fall back on my smartphone's tehtering during prime time usage. Usually cable is suppose to be more stable than DSL but not here in Elizabeth City, NC. Here you better go for the DSL.