Well, today Convergence (Cybernet) in Guatemala installed my cable line. They use a REALLY OLD Zenith modem. At first, they could not configure it, since it requires, get this, a Win3.0 program (ZUDUSR.EXE) to configure. Plus, they have to connect via serial using this old Win16 program. So, they had to go out somewhere else, configure the box, and bring it here.

Well, they assigned me this IP: 192.10.18.76, telling me it was a public IP with no filters at all. It struck me odd they'd have a class B assigned to them, especially 192.10.0.0/16. So, I called support.

He tells me, “Oh, you have a private IP.” I said that 192.10.18.76 was not private and actually fully routable. He disagrees and says that 192.* is private. I'm sure people who own other IPs in that netblock would be surprised to hear this.

So, it turns out Convergence is using else's (Symbolics, Inc.) netblock for now reason, other than that they are clueless. He says it's perfectly correct to route like this. I think ARIN and IANA might beg to differ. So I'm going to send him to ARIN's whois, so he can see for himself that he's 100% incorrect. My past experience with Convergence / Cybernet was pretty much the same: utterly clueless people for the most part.

Oh, and they filter ICMP, for reasons unknown. My guess is to prevent customers from easily seeing how bad their lag / packet loss is. Sigh... why is so hard to find people here who know what they're doing? As if basic TCP/IP routing was so incredibly difficult...