I am running ARC connecting to my Roon server at home. The Roon server is connected to the internet via a broadband connection with static IP address. This works great: When on the road I can connect from my phone back to my Roon Server and listen remotely to my music.
However, now I want to move to another Internet Service Provider which does not offer static IPs. Will this be a problem with ARC when my Roon server at home is not connected with a static IP address?
It is not necessary to have a static ip address from your ISP in order to use Roon ARC successfully. However, these days, an increasing number of ISPs use CG-NAT which is incompatible with port forwarding. Of the ISPs that use CG-NAT, some of them offer a static ip address as an alternate provision (usually at a higher monthly cost).
What you need to know is that your ISP provides a public ip address that supports port forwarding (ie does not employ CG-NAT).
Usually, the only need for a static ip address is to support incoming connections from outside of your network (just as you are with ARC). Consequently, you can be pretty sure that when a static ip address is provided, it is publicly routable. However dynamic ip addresses can also be publicly routable as well.
Unfortunately, it is often difficult to determine whether an ISP uses CG-NAT or not. It is not something that affects the majority of residential users and thus thus don’t often make any statement about its use(or not) on their Web sites or in any marketing/advertising material.
This all means that you have to be careful when selecting an ISP if you want to run any server that you want to be accessed from outside of your network (not just ARC). You may have to contact the ISP directly in order to ask whether or not the ip address that they provide is publicly routable (and thus supports port forwarding).
Selecting an ISP that provides a static ip address makes this much easier because it immediately tells you that CG-NAT is not used and your service provision will thus support port forwarding.
If course you can also use ARC without port forwarding using Tailscale. The Roon help centre article on this can be found at:
Tailscale can be use family easily with most Roon Server setups. The only complication comes with RoonOS devices using BIOS boot (the original Nucleus, the Nucleus Plus and some older ROCK installs) since Tailscale can not be installed on these devices. These is still a way to use Tailscale but it it more complicated and requires an addition always on computer (Raspberry Pi or similar devices are often used because of their low power consumption).
I think you’ll find that the majority of ARC users do not have a static IP. I and none of my friends that use ARC have one and it works most fine for us.
