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       Dammit Charter/Spectrum!
       October 13th, 2025
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       I finally got arguably decent internet hooked up at my house* today, and
       oh boy has it been a journey through complete and utter bullshit.  Many
       folks has warned me that the new-to-my-area ISP, Charter/Spectrum is
       extremely difficult to work with, and boy were they not kidding.
       Throughout the entire ordeal of dealing with them, I have reiterated
       dozens upon dozens of times that I do not want NAT or Wi-Fi; imagine my
       surprise upon the install being completed when the installer tries to
       give me a Wi-Fi password... Now, to the installer's credit, the support
       site does say to call business support to deal with Wi-Fi provisioning,
       no problem I think, I call them... Everyone tells me that the Wi-Fi
       cannot be disabled. What. The. Fuck.
       
       So, just to see what the hell I am dealing with, I do indeed login to
       the Wi-Fi, just in case it has a captive setup portal or some other crap
       that allows the Wi-Fi to be turned off, no dice... Oh, and it has NAT.
       At this point my only options to deal with the Wi-Fi would be to either
       open the router up and physically remove the Wi-Fi card (not a bad idea)
       or to remove the router altogether... But... Spectrum EPON customers 
       with static IP are absolutely required to use the Spectrum supplied
       router; because it uses password protected RIPv2 to provide the static
       IP. Great.
       
       I decided to ignore the NAT (which only applies to DHCP) and Wi-Fi
       issues and test out the static IP; the documentation on the Spectrum
       website for my client class is absolutely wrong, it says to call in with
       the MAC address that will be used with the static IP, but as it turns
       out, I merely had to put the IP information in the existing router, easy
       ............ or not. The dumbass spectrum router's IPv6 implementation
       is hot fucking garbage; it won't respond to PD requests. Great. I did
       notice, however, that attaching my router to the Spectrum ONT provides
       working** IPv6 PD, so I have come up with the incredibly ghetto solution
       of having an ethernet switch in between the ONT and the Spectrum router,
       and having two cables going into my router, one from their router for
       the IPv4, and another going to the switch+ONT for the IPv6. Insane.
       
       I have a headache. I can't believe I found an ISP worse than Lumen/
       Brightspeed, but here we are.
       
       
       *My house is a small/home office (SOHO), it's business-class service.
       
       **barely, seems to limit to 17 prefixes, 16 of which have to be
       contiguous? weird.
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       nice story zac 👍
       Posted Tue Oct 14 15:50:32 UTC 2025 by 103.171.163.189
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       Good to see you posting again, even if it is only a rant about ISP's :) 
       - IanJ
       Posted Tue Oct 14 16:31:00 UTC 2025 by fugu.contractcoder.biz.
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