You've likely heard the rumors that the Green Bay lab is moving across town. While you'd think most of the hard work would be in tearing down our infrastructure and bodily moving it across town, turns out that setting up data services is a lot more painful...

Our biggest challenge apparently lies in the fact that CMP owns a whole lot of IP address space, and the Green Bay lab happens to have an entire Class C all to ourselves that we'd like to continue to have routed to our location. No problem, right?

Wrong. So very wrong.

My first call was to Time Warner Cable, whose business service Don and I currently use at home. It's not too bad price wise for symmetrical T1 speeds, but they were completely caught off guard and unable to determine whether they could, in fact, route our address space.

While I waited for a response from one of their "router jockeys", I hopped on over to AT&T. They could, in fact, provide SDSL service to the new lab location, and at a price point that was better than Time Warner. No information on the web, of course, about my soon-to-be-lost-in-the-ether address space. After nearly twenty minutes of hunting through their web site I finally found a phone number which could connect me with...sales. Alright, let's chat.

My first call was met with an automated response and then...an error. "Your call did not go through...019P". What's this? A global phone company couldn't connect my call?

Talk about bad omens.

A second try connected me successfully to a sales rep. She was nice, and admitted she could not answer my question. So she conferenced in a tier 1 support chix0r. Who could not answer my question. So the tier 1 support chix0r conferenced in her technical manager, who insisted that our address space could not be routed through DSL. First he explained it was technically impossible (which it is not, thank you very much, the address space belongs to us, not the provider it is currently being routed through) then he explained that the service was only available through a dedicated line. Ahhh...it's all about the money. The sales rep, still conferenced in, then tried valiantly to connect me with AT&T's data services team.

"Your call did not go through...019P".

A moment later, a busy signal. Seconds later, dead silence.

::sigh:: I'm guessing that if this paragon of phone service can't manage to connect me to a sales rep that I probably shouldn't trust them to correctly route my data.

I guess it's good they didn't get my phone number, I don't think I could talk to them again without laughing.