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How Much Does a Comcast Business Static IP Cost?

Published rates put a block of 13 usable addresses at $40–$60 a month, with the list price often $79.95 and at least one customer reporting $44.95. That sits on top of business internet, which starts around $69.99 a month for the entry tier and climbs steeply for anything server-capable. Add provisioning of up to $199 and one cost guide's worked example reaches $1,199 in the first year. I pay roughly four times what residential internet costs. But the price is the easy part. Two things cost more than the bill: you still cannot easily give a device its own address without buying more equipment, and the addresses are not yours — they belong to the carrier, and you hand them back when you leave.

What it actually costs

Published figures, not my statement:

Those are other people's published figures, not a quote I was given, and rates move by market. Two further things are worth saying plainly. The first is that the block price appears to be negotiable — there are repeated reports of people getting it reduced at renewal or retention, so the list price is an opening position rather than a fact. The second is that the comparison with residential is not like for like: business service brings a different service-level commitment, a different support queue and symmetric upload, and those are real things you are paying for. Whether you need them is a separate question from whether you need a static IP. They are sold to you together.

The part nobody warns you about: you never own them

Two things bite at the end, not the beginning.

It is a contract. Residential internet you cancel whenever you feel like it. A business static-IP arrangement comes with a term commitment. In my case signing took minutes and leaving will not be anything like as quick.

I am deliberately not going to quote you a figure for the exit fee. Early termination charges vary by contract, by region and by the term you signed, and a number from my agreement tells you nothing reliable about yours — expect something that can run into the hundreds, and read your own paperwork rather than my account of mine. The point is not the amount. The point is that there is one at all, and that it is the difference between a service you can walk away from this month and one you cannot.

I am still on mine. That is the position I am writing this from — not someone who escaped and is now selling you the exit, but someone who is locked in and would have chosen differently with better information.

And the addresses were never yours. This one is not my opinion or an industry generalisation. It is in Comcast's own terms. Section 8.4 of the Comcast Business Services Customer Terms and Conditions, headed Ownership of Telephone Numbers and Addresses, reads:

Customer acknowledges that use of the Services does not give it any ownership or other rights in any telephone number or Internet/on-line addresses provided, including but not limited to Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, e-mail addresses and web addresses.

The same wording appears in their Enterprise agreement at section 2.5(B). Both are linked at the bottom of this post, and they are worth reading in the original.

To be precise about what that clause does and does not say: it states you acquire no ownership or other rights. It does not itself spell out what happens on the day you cancel. But the consequence follows from the clause rather than needing to be asserted — if you hold no rights in the addresses, there is nothing to take with you when the service ends, nothing to sell, and nothing to carry to another provider. You are not buying them, and you are not really renting them either, because a rental at least implies you are paying something close to what the thing is worth.

Which brings us to the part I found genuinely annoying once I worked it out.

What the addresses are actually worth

There is a line in one cost guide that gets quoted a lot:

An IP address costs them nothing. It is a number in a database. The fee is pure margin.

It is a good line, it is not quite true, and the true version is worse for the carrier.

IPv4 addresses are genuinely scarce and there is a real market in them. Transfers in the first half of 2026 averaged around $20 an address. Leasing runs roughly $0.30 to $0.35 per address per month. A /28 is sixteen addresses, so the block you are renting has a market lease value of about $5 a month.

The list price is $79.95 and a reported real one is $44.95.

So it is not pure margin — there is a real asset underneath, and it is not free. It is that the asset is cheap and the markup is large: roughly nine times the market lease rate at the reported price, and more at list. Put the other way round, sixteen addresses at market purchase price is about $320, which is around seven months of what you are paying to rent them. Inside a year of that monthly fee you could have bought the block outright.

One honest caveat, because the obvious conclusion does not quite follow: you cannot simply buy sixteen addresses and have a consumer or small-business ISP route them to your house — that is not a Comcast quirk, it is how address space works. Announcing address space you own needs your own network number and a provider willing to route it, which is a different project with its own costs and its own long waits. That is a post of its own, and I went down that road. But it is worth knowing that the thing you are renting at nine times its market rate is a thing you are allowed to own.

The thing you still cannot do after paying

This is the one that caught me out.

Paying for static IPs gets you the addresses. It does not get you a straightforward way to put one of them on a particular machine.

Handing one address to the box in the corner running the game server, and the next address to the box beside it, generally wants a router that can do it — a UDM or something in that class. More equipment, more money, after you have already paid for the addresses themselves.

I did not know that going in. I assumed buying a block of addresses meant I could use a block of addresses. What I had bought was a block of addresses and a homework assignment.

Why I paid it anyway

I host things out of my house.

There is a Minecraft server my neighbourhood plays on, and I record and host a few other services. None of that survives an address that changes. The moment the IP moves, everyone holding the old one is knocking on a door that is not mine any more, and it all breaks at once until I go and tell every one of them the new number.

A static address fixes that completely. That is not nothing — it is the entire reason I paid, and I would pay it again rather than have things break weekly. If your address moves and things break, you are not being fussy. You have a real problem, and Comcast Business genuinely solves it.

When Comcast Business is the right call

I would be selling you something if I said never. Cases where it is the right buy:

If two or more of those are true of you, pay for the business line. This post is not for you.

What I did instead

Here is where my own product turns up, so read this with the suspicion it deserves.

The Minecraft server is what made me think about it differently. To let people in, I was handing out my house's IP address. That address is where I live. Giving it to a neighbourhood's worth of people, and to whoever they passed it on to, was something I had been quietly uneasy about for a long time.

So I installed TunnelNet on that server. What I hand out now is a TunnelNet address, which is not linked to my home. The server sits exactly where it always did; the address people connect to is no longer my front door.

That is the $10 a month ingress plan: a public IPv4 address for a machine you own. It does the thing I actually needed — inbound connections to an address that does not move — without business internet, without new routing equipment, and without a term you have to buy your way out of.

There is a $100 a month Business plan as well. It is the same network. What it buys is the commitment: a reply from me within 8 working hours, and onboarding done by a person instead of a signup form. I am the sole operator, so that is literally me. It is not 24/7 and it is not weekend cover, and I would rather write that down than let you discover it.

The honest ending

I needed a static IP. So I signed up, paid roughly four times what residential costs, found out I needed more equipment to actually use the addresses, got locked into a contract I am still in, and learned somewhere along the way that the addresses were never mine to begin with.

Then I built a network, partly to solve this exact problem, and the irony is not lost on me: building my own is arguably what freed me from needing Comcast Business in the first place. I want to be careful with that. I am not certain I could drop it entirely today and I have not run that experiment, so I am not going to claim I have. But the specific thing I needed it for — the part that made the bill worth paying — is the part TunnelNet now does.

If this had existed when I started, I think I would have bought it instead. It did not, so I built it. That is the whole story, and it is the most honest pitch I have.

Get a public IP — $10/mo For businesses See all plans

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