A few weeks ago we received a nice little letter from nbnco, advising that we would soon be able to get an HFC connection installed.
I was disappointed to discover that Internode was not going to offer either static IPv4 or an IPv6 service, let alone their Professional pack with NBN connections, and cast around for another ISP. Word of mouth got me to Skymesh and guineapig status (since they haven't formally started accepting HFC connections).
Since we're quite happy with the functionality of the Mikrotik CRS109-8G-1S-2HnD-IN, I declined purchasing a new modem; the nbnco installer provided the Blessed Arris cablemodem and all I needed then was for the connection to be activated.
Once it was, I very quickly reconfigured the mtik to do what I needed. Since Skymesh is using IPoE, I disabled the pppoe client activity. I also needed to change my firewall rules a little, to reflect that actions should be occurring on a different physical port (which I had to remember to take out of the bridge). Finally, a bunch of mucking around with IPv6 address assignment got me to the point where traceroute6.net was able to ping my server's designated public address. Yay!
While Skymesh doesn't offer PTR records, I'm still able to get A, AAAA, CNAME and MX records setup, courtesy of the free service at https://www.dynu.com.
Now that we're back up and running with a shiny new connection, I'm really pleased to see that http://beta.speedtest.net/result/5894030060 is pretty much what we get for both uploads and downloads on wired connections. Last week I celebrated that by having an hour-long video chat with a colleague down in Melbourne. With the 720p camera in my mbp, over the wireless connection. No dropouts, no blockiness :-)
I need to set up Smokeping, and see about a few other analytics things I can get going, but in general it's been a seamless transition.