Mini-Rant - Premium Support for PPPOE?

[Galant]

I've just been emailing with an ISP on behalf of a client.
We need to set up a VPN within the business and so I reached out to the ISP to obtain the PPPOE credentials.

"Sure", they said, "We can do that. We just need confirmation from the account holder and you need to upgrade to premium support. £100 per month."

And they attached a shiny graphic showing how you get guaranteed call backs within 15 minutes during normal business hours, not weekends, and also "Advanced Features - including option to activate bridge mode on your router".

Call backs during working hours is hardly what I'd call premium support. And as for 'activating bridge mode', I've been in the router, the option is right there, I just need the PPPOE credentials and I can disable the router's connection and set up my own.

What an utter rip-off!!!

Just ridiculous.

[DanceswithUnix]

Have a similar thing with the BT business connection at the office.
The fibre comes in to some terminating box, and then there is a mandatory Cisco router that we have to have. It looks like quite a nice box and can do some firewalling, but that costs extra. You can use your own router, but that costs extra. So it sits there consuming one of our /29 address range with no real benefit. We haven't run out of externally visible IP addresses yet, but at some point that is going to really annoy me I'm sure.

I feel your pain.

I our case, being out in the sticks, there wasn't any other choice to get a 100Mb/s connection though.

[Galant]

To give the ISP a little bit of credit, they replied to my polite but incredulous email with a possible solution. I was expecting to be dismissed but instead of that or complaining one of their guys suggested a work around (DMZ).
It doesn't change the silliness of charging £100 a month for PPPOE access, but the fact they tried to help was a nice surprise.