As somebody who routinely fields network abuse complaints for Sonic.net, I'm quite aware of how frequently our customers tend to switch up their IPs. Rarely. Before we revised our log retention policies, I would see lease histories that generally spanned back however long a customer's device had been on our network be it days, weeks, or months. All with the same IP.bill wrote:But I'm wondering if, as someone who isn't interested in changing your IP, you might be unaware of how frequently they actually are changing for some Sonic users.
If every customer were to yank the power cords that feed their computers, routers, and modems at 11pm tonight and did not plug them back in again until 11am tomorrow, the vast majority of them would request the same IP addresses they had when they lost power. As they wouldn't have been taken by other users in the meantime, all of these addresses would be available and our server would happily comply with their explicit requests to get their old addresses back.
There is some amount of churn, to be sure. People introduce new devices onto the network, which are given unused leases, which cause IPs that were previously used to become unavailable. This can cascade a bit, but tends to settle right back down.
Oddly, the easiest way I know of to get a fresh IP, as most devices don't have a setting for "do not DHCPREQUEST for last-held IP," is to tell your device to change its MAC address while it's still holding a valid lease. That will cause our server to refuse to give you that same IP, which will prompt your device to issue a DHCPDISCOVER again. The root problem here is a combination of our not using PPPoE (at this point asking our existing DHCP-based customers to switch over to PPPoE would be quite an undertaking) and the default behavior of most customer-owned DHCP clients.
There are utilities out there with names like DHCP IP Forcer that are supposed to provide an automated workaround, but I seriously distrust anybody that's trying to peddle Rapidshare wait-circumvention tools and such; they just smell of malware to me. Maybe I'm just jaded.
Regarding the size of the IP pools, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that two people with similar IPs are geographically near each other, whether it's us, AT&T, Comcast, or any other provider. If the person on 70.134.10.5 is in the South Bay, the person on 70.134.10.7 probably isn't in New Jersey. It's certainly possible to set up a network that way, but most network operators wouldn't find it practical.
All said, I think VPN and proxies are both more convenient and less shady and more practical than the alternative. There's very little reason why you can't be a Swedish IP to the outside world, especially when such things can be set up to run on boot.