[HN Gopher] A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
___________________________________________________________________
A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
Author : vedmed
Score : 572 points
Date : 2025-11-23 00:46 UTC (22 hours ago)
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| paulatreides wrote:
| > Xfinity is the only gigabit provider in this area. No
| competition. No alternatives. I can't leave. So they don't have
| to care.
|
| many such cases...
| 1over137 wrote:
| "only gigabit provider". Like those grow on trees. Lots of
| people would love to have a fraction of that speed.
| fsckboy wrote:
| everybody has a fraction of that speed
| bmacho wrote:
| Actually bandwidth if not 0 then is _almost always_
| irrational: rac number of bits / irrac time in seconds.
| AngryData wrote:
| Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper
| than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and
| power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even
| have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm
| didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly
| functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone
| clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup
| ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber
| to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it
| for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile
| internet. And they are still expanding across the entire
| state so are obviously earning money from it.
|
| Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given
| billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber
| companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even
| in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It reminds of this book
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-
| Possibi...
|
| which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a
| weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism
| against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep
| making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had
| been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and
| lower quality steel than international competitors who were
| using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern
| processes. In a market economy they would have been forced
| to go out of business or invest in new equipment --- that
| is, make a disinvestment that they didn't want to make
| (that's why they call it "capital(ism)"), it's like the
| capital makes decisions on its own.
|
| Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the
| copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it
| with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long
| term, but what we did get was much more complex and path
| dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a
| great business that built out infrastructure which could be
| repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little
| countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open
| hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out
| good infrastructure that hasn't been built yet.
| ashirviskas wrote:
| Shut up, 1gbps up/down in 2025 should be a basic human right.
|
| I can't believe the things you learned to justify in US
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| You are absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance
| towards ISPs that provide anything less than one gigabit
| per second.
| aydyn wrote:
| This but unironically.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I was serious.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Once an area has its shit in order regulatory-wise: yes. Here
| my house org will upgrade from 1- to 10-gbit next month,
| mostly cause it also bumps the wifi generation to the latest
| and the cost difference was neglible. Previous hardware was
| end of life , so we had to change stuff regardless.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This has to be the weirdest post I've seen in a while? Cable
| infrastructure in the US is awful. I can't imagine a scenario
| where it would be reliable.
| nativeit wrote:
| I don't think it was the author's intent to shock us by the
| state of CATV infrastructure.
| vedmed wrote:
| Yeah its pretty weird I created a website just to write this
| article just so I could make this post. I'm so frustrated with
| these outages :(
| nativeit wrote:
| There's not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still
| fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it's still
| the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US.
| I've been on Spectrum for several years, and it's been largely
| trouble-free. I'm in a rural area of North Carolina, but near
| enough to Charlotte that they don't have the entire region
| locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling
| out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months),
| Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based
| broadband. I'll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload
| speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we've
| experienced.
|
| I'm sure these market conditions are common in most of the
| country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I
| imagine it's much more susceptible to damage by freezing
| temperatures and natural disasters.
|
| But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad
| incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting
| to highlight the poor state of telecommunications
| infrastructure.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not
| much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample,
| I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where
| toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is
| reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't
| service it.
|
| Certainly, there's problems in some part of the network, and
| getting past level 1 tech support is hard. Physical security is
| pretty much unlikely. That said, I don't think those boxes are
| going to take much abuse to open even if they are locked.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Easy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
|
| A lot of the Northeast US that was impacted has fairly 'fresh'
| copper infrastructure in the last 20 years.
|
| ... but in reality, yeah. The outdoor plant does not get taken
| care of well (in general), there's only so many field techs to
| go around to be able to re-balance an entire RF system and its
| nodes.
| nativeit wrote:
| I've dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both
| cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing
| that made a difference. By that point, they'd already burned all
| the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have
| fixed things with competition, but I wouldn't know, my clients
| got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they
| hear about it.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Makes me wonder if Starlink is an option for OP. It's more
| expensive than most ISPs, but probably less than 3x what most
| people pay.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The op showed starlink as a comparison. It was one of several
| 100Mbit options. Comcast is the only service above the
| 100Mbit level at 1200Mbit advertised .
| benjojo12 wrote:
| 100Mbit seems fine? I obviously don't have the full picture
| for what the OP is doing with their line on a day-to-day
| basis, but, saying that you're entirely out of options when
| there is an option that is just slower is a little odd
|
| (I do get that Starlink is also quite expensive if it is
| not your only serious choice)
| Aachen wrote:
| Given that they have multi-minute outages multiple times
| per day and they're _still_ not switching to one of the
| 100mbps options, I think it 's a safe assumption that
| they really do need that speed more than the reliability
|
| I'm a heavy user myself and would be perfectly pleased
| with a symmetric 100/100 connection, but would even
| rather make due with 20/20 if that meant no regular
| outages, so I would agree with you but OP's needs seem
| specific
| willis936 wrote:
| Starlink service is blacked out if you're within 20 miles of
| a radiotelescope that uses nearby bands as starlink. Maybe
| that's considered an edge case, but I can promise you Comcast
| has a lot of neglected infrastructure in those areas. I have
| receipts to prove that service dropouts are from outside the
| demarc but I had to waste a lot of time getting a tech to
| come out and say "looks fine to me".
| jliptzin wrote:
| It's not more expensive, I am paying $40 / month for 100
| Mbit, which is fine for me.
| bpbp-mango wrote:
| I'd start my own ISP for the area
| cube00 wrote:
| It's possible if you have the startup cash
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906
| altairprime wrote:
| If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem.
| Docsis 3.1 in Comcast's deployed infrastructure has severe
| repeating outage issues when there's a cracked line somewhere
| allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but
| have no effect on 3.0.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| According to the article, it happens on a very specific set of
| intervals. That's not an RF issue. Downgrading/replacing the
| device isn't a solution.
| altairprime wrote:
| There was an irregularly but often transmitting radio antenna
| tower fifty feet from my home, and the outage duration when
| an outage occurred _was_ precisely the same each time,
| because Docsis is very carefully specified in how it starts
| up. (Don't remember the duration, sorry.) The outage interval
| varied based on antenna usage; if OP is suffering a similar
| circuit break, a continuous transmitter nearby could
| certainly cause continuous outages at the regular interval
| "renegotiating, success, assigned channel collision" loop.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| The outages mostly happened at very specific times during
| the hour (:29 and :44) for 17 months. It just doesn't add
| up to being RF interference, especially from a radio tower.
| But if OP has a radio tower 50 feet from their home, I
| guess we could consider it.
|
| How did you know when the radio tower was transmitting?
| altairprime wrote:
| The value here is "triage experiment: try an older
| modem". If it reveals something, now they're not stuck.
| If it fails in the same way, no knowledge is gained.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| According to the article (again), he was using his own
| Xfinity-approved modem. I doubt his neighbor was also
| using the same model.
|
| There's no point in performing random experiments if
| you've already ruled out those causes in some way. It
| would also require either renting a modem temporarily or
| buying one.
| immibis wrote:
| If that's a ham antenna, go talk to the guy and he might
| know some tricks for either shielding your connection
| (doubt that's possible though), pressuring Comcast, or else
| at least making an effort to avoid frequencies that
| interfere with your internet.
| altairprime wrote:
| The county ambulance dispatch center's antenna structure
| was across the street.
| mh- wrote:
| I think that's probably why they downgraded his speed from 1200
| to 700, in an attempt to avoid using the more sensitive
| channels.
| altairprime wrote:
| I did not find provisioning speed to have any effect
| whatsoever on the channels or encoding negotiated by the
| multiple modems I swapped into the circuit; whether 50, 125,
| or 1000mbit. It would be logical to do that; perhaps now they
| do?
| razingeden wrote:
| i touched on this in a longer comment in this thread because i
| think that docsis 3.0 goes up to 900-1002mhz
|
| if downgrading to docsis 3.0 (or downgrading to 500/700mb)
| "fixed" your issue, you probably have a 5-1000mhz splitter
| thats not just a rf splitter but also, a filter and its JUST
| leaky enough to allow 1002mhz through.
|
| or maybe the modems happy negotiating down to 900mhz.
|
| but maybe not quite enough for 1008-1100+ required by docsis
| 3.1
|
| there will be anecdotal reports of a 5-1000mhz splitter
| "working just fine" maybe that ones a REALLY leaky filter thats
| also allowing 1008mhz.
|
| or also a case of negotiating a lower channel...
|
| gigabit speed and docsis 3.0 are about the threshold for the
| 5-1000mhz
|
| problems would manifest with docsis 3.1, gigabit speed(maybe)
| and then almost guaranteed at 1.2 gig service+
|
| this idea of "sensitive channels" is extremely close to nailing
| it
|
| splitters fail as well. they'll bleed through AND filter bands
| theyre not supposed to. but i didnt seize on that or inside
| wiring for OP because "the neighbor gets it too"
|
| im on a gigabit implementation that has to have +/- 1100mhz ,
| and my own woes uncovered an 800mhz splitter inside a
| wallplate. it would lock. it would even run at gig somehow.
| just not very well. its a 5-2500mhz splitter now. a 5-1200mhz
| would also do (for now)
|
| everyone on your tap should be using multiplexed signals, and
| you should have a good 300mhz or so to play with and lock onto.
| but if every single one of you gets kneecapped at +/- 1000mhz,
| then theres a really congested 100mhz band and another
| 100-200mhz thats open for everyone but _you_ cant lock on to
| it.
| altairprime wrote:
| In my case, one of the main loops had a cable break under a
| roadway, in a place on the loop that was wholly Comcast infra
| rather than subscriber. You're not wrong about the general
| case! But for that reason, they basically stopped
| acknowledging the issue to me at all, never followed up on
| support calls ever again, and it took them maybe three years
| to close that roadway overnight and fix their cable. (I was
| able to manifest the issue at a service speed of 125mbps when
| capacity up to 1+ gbps was available, but of course that low
| limit didn't stop the modems from negotiating whatever full-
| width max-QAM links they could.)
|
| Diagnostics mastery note: logically ruling out a readily
| testable possibility is only (somewhat) logical when one
| _hasn't_ exhausted all other possibilities. Displeasing and
| successful diagnostic tests that _ought_ not to differentiate
| but _do_ are how one exposes issues hiding in the blind spots
| of other experts. (If they hadn't explicitly said 'I have no
| ideas left' in as many words, I probably wouldn't have posted
| at all.) Here is an idea they hadn't openly said they
| considered. The _reasons_ this idea might or might not pan
| out are still interesting to me! TIL! But it was a beautiful
| and consumer-accessible scalpel of diagnostic and earned me a
| walkthrough of the signal contamination specifics by the
| senior truck tech who showed up to help the lesser truck
| tech, so perhaps it'll help another.
| bombcar wrote:
| I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally
| fixed it was to _upgrade_ to business-class service, complain to
| _business_ support, and they sent a tech who eventually found
| what it was (a tester on the line _painted over_ so as to nearly
| be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to
| consumer DSL.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier
| this year, end of contract came up.
|
| I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready
| for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was
| showing up in advertising on the same road family business is
| on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you
| to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want
| to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to
| finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term
| contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No
| promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site.
| Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete.
| Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location
| went from 300/20 to 300/300.
|
| Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a
| tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared
| to buy my own modems. Thankfully it's been pretty reliable,
| better than the power utility (especially since comcast will
| literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in
| extended outages).
| stego-tech wrote:
| I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter's shitlist to
| this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years
| ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data
| had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to
| wait for the line to become available again. No amount of
| technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or
| anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with
| their infrastructure.
|
| So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later,
| it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
|
| I miss when the government had teeth and used it against
| companies, man.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I recently had to do the same thing with Cox. It's funny how a
| customer is responsible for repair fees until the FCC gets
| involved and all of a sudden they figure out the necessary work
| outside the house.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| One period they were "moving tv totally digitally" and as part
| of that my node basically ran out of bandwidth 3pm to 9am every
| day for two months. I lucked out because I was on business and
| knew my sales person and happened to live near their backup
| head office in the country but it took a tech driving over
| refusing to enter my house showing me this on his tablet and me
| driving to the office at 450pm super mad to finally get one of
| the engineers.
|
| They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing
| will be done until the move was completed.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the
| signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to
| just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that
| modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they
| send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing
| enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
|
| It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I
| also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
| vedmed wrote:
| Hey thanks I didn't realize I could do that. Updated the
| article with the docsis log.
|
| Bunch of
|
| UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization
| failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing
| ddtaylor wrote:
| What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise
| ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed
| amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually
| added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
| razingeden wrote:
| gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum
| recently.
|
| have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the
| modem outside at the drop for awhile?
|
| i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if
| youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all
| part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time ..
|
| and well... you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that
| would be the latter case
|
| after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding
| a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside
| a wallplate.
|
| TLDR:
|
| you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by
| comcast still.
|
| MORE:
|
| OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem
| under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading
| to 500mb might mysteriously "fix" it).
|
| but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb.
|
| spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters
|
| ANECODTAL:
|
| my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped ,
| cycled and had horrible upload speeds.
|
| techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech
| took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss.
| i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and
| they had an "aha" moment.
|
| TECHNICAL:
|
| i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in
| this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the
| game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable
| modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look
| it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957-1151 MHz or
| 1008-1152 MHz
|
| its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a
| 5-1000mhz filter.
|
| its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the
| filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but
| thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more
| like bleed-through.
|
| sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto
| your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden
| days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little
| bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get
| the IDEA. :>
| toast0 wrote:
| This seems pretty likely, but shouldn't a tech roll have
| included sampling the signal strength/snr at these
| frequencies? Or would the tech tools be likely to be on old
| frequencies too?
| razingeden wrote:
| the SNR and the lock would be perfect at the drop using
| tech meter.
|
| or, plugging your modem into your dmarc/outside box for a
| little bit would also confirm or deny this
| toast0 wrote:
| Tech should plug the meter into where the modem is too,
| though, right? And if the SNR looks good at the dmarc and
| not at the modem, there's your problem... Tech can peace
| out if you don't have inside line coverage.
| vedmed wrote:
| I had an old 15+ year old line when I moved in. Helped my
| neighbor cut a few hundred of his monthly by getting
| xfinity and they ran a brand new drop for him. Then just
| recently they "upgraded" my line. But I don't have any
| splitter or filter its just a connector with a ground that
| attaches my home cable to the drop cable.
| razingeden wrote:
| the reason id suggested connecting your modem at the
| outside drop would also cover any and all inside wiring
| issues. and that could be anything. frayed end. a nail
| through it. moisture.
|
| i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 ,
| but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty
| good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just
| yesterday:
|
| https://ibb.co/5XjkJ57J
|
| - expires in 6 months
|
| the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then
| if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer
| service "look, i connected at the drop and have the same
| issue its NOT my inside wiring."
|
| everything from that point back is their problem and they
| owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof
| and go back with it.
|
| in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i
| unfortunately had some digging to do
|
| its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go
| ripping open all their wall plates and checking every
| inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one.
| unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what
| needs to be done.
|
| but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem
| this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a
| PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your
| inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it.
| maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts
| end faster when they review it.
| martinald wrote:
| Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there
| is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that
| time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights
| which would be on a timer and cause chaos).
|
| This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from
| the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line,
| not just ping tests or speed tests.
|
| Also, why wouldn't starlink be an alternative?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The author explains in the article they're looking for gigabit
| service and Comcast is the only player in the area.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas
| lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the
| author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs.
|
| Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level
| (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times).
| So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for
| Xfinity.
|
| Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than
| his requirements, for one.
| martinald wrote:
| Did he update the post since I commented? I'm sure they
| weren't there.
|
| I'm pretty convinced it is RF interference. (Nearly) all
| DOCSIS interference is at node level, it's a shared system so
| any RF is going to knock out neighbouring properties.
|
| He also could do with pasting the SNR and power levels for
| each DOCSIS channel :).
|
| Fair enough if the author really needs 1gig, but I think it's
| pushing to say it's a monopoly based on that. 99% of
| residential users would not really notice 300mbit starlink vs
| 1gig (and starlink is likely to reach gig speeds in the next
| year or so).
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Starlink is not a substitute for fixed broadband. It might
| be adequate for most use cases, but it's not equivalent and
| it never will be. Your "99%" figure is nonsense. More than
| 1% of people will see the difference in download speeds
| between 1Gbps and 300Mbps. You realize some apps and games
| show you information about latency and bandwidth?
|
| Also, just because they advertise "up to 305Mbps" doesn't
| mean everyone is getting that. A friend of mine with
| Starlink in the midwest gets about 100Mbps during off-
| hours. See <https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-us-
| performance-2025> - median speeds are typically less than
| 150Mbps.
|
| Starlink also costs about 2x-4x as much per Mbps as 1Gbps
| service (at least where I am). I doubt they're going to
| suddenly offer 1Gbps speeds in the next year without
| changing their pricing. They'll add a new, more expensive
| plan.
|
| Even 1Gbps Starlink (which would be more than 3x the
| current max speeds) is going to have other differences such
| as increased latency (they mention 30-40ms in one place,
| 25-100ms in another), more jitter, and lost signal
| sometimes during bad weather. Starlink also uses CGNAT
| which eliminates a bunch of use cases and introduces its
| own problems with certain apps and games.
|
| They've had issues with capacity before where they wouldn't
| accept signups for some areas. Adding capacity involves
| launching more satellites.
|
| Starlink isn't the ultimate solution to everyone's Internet
| access problems.
| martinald wrote:
| When did I say that it was? I'm just saying it's hard to
| claim Comcast has a true monopoly anywhere now starlink
| exists. There's loads of issues with starlink, but it is
| a very viable alternative and is a big problem for
| incumbent US telcos as it caps what they can charge
| (there are a lot of telcos charging $100/month+ in rural
| areas for awful 2-8mbit/s DSL).
|
| It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I suspect
| Elon will push the pricing down further and further.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| That's like saying Comcast doesn't have a monopoly
| because you can get crappy mobile Internet at 1Mbps
| speeds by tethering to your phone. Or saying DSL is
| "competition" at 12Mbps speeds. By your definition, there
| are no ISP monopolies left on Earth now that Starlink is
| here.
|
| BTW according to the study I linked, less than half of
| Starlink customers get service that meets the anemic FCC
| definition of broadband.
|
| > It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I
| suspect Elon will push the pricing down further and
| further.
|
| This is hand-wavey conjecture, not an argument. He might
| lower the pricing if he gets enough welfare for his
| companies from the government. But only if that's a
| requirement, otherwise no he's not going to lower any
| pricing. The monthly pricing for Starlink has gone _up_ ,
| not down.
| tfvlrue wrote:
| I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in
| Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my
| cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day
| despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
|
| I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all
| new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to
| the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect
| an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I
| discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section
| of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared
| and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce
| the connection loss fairly easily.
|
| Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much
| harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole
| needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone
| had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No
| amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was
| not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was
| during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that
| happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges
| if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce
| the problem, so I cancelled it.
|
| Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town
| had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet
| problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not
| really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get
| a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had
| a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one
| home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
|
| This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support
| channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I
| think they called it the "executive support team" or something
| along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that
| way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level
| support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the
| local or state level government may be the author's best shot at
| getting this resolved.
| joezydeco wrote:
| These days you get a lot better result from _any_ company if
| you take a few minutes, find the email of a few VPs in the
| target company, and write the execs directly.
|
| Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?"
| added to it. You get phone calls the next day.
| decasia wrote:
| This reminds me exactly of "The Art of Turboing"[1]
|
| [1] https://www.macwhiz.com/blog/art-of-turboing/
| masfuerte wrote:
| Or send an actual letter in the post to the customer service
| department. I guess approximately nobody does this nowadays
| but it works very well for me.
| op00to wrote:
| Send the letter via overnight mail - or better yet, FedEx.
| Mail goes to a mail room which may or may not be screened.
| FedEx seems far more "important", and make it to the
| executive's assistant's desk who is far more likely to act
| on it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Registered mail with proof of delivery works and is scary
| for them because it's a legally-admissible paper trail and
| proof of you trying to resolve the problem in good faith,
| which will complicate any of their attempts to collect
| money out of you down the line should you choose to stop
| paying (which you should also do if they don't address the
| issue in a reasonable timeframe).
| op00to wrote:
| Executive Email Carpet Bombing no longer works well, even
| with a cogent, calm, clear explanation of the issue and what
| you want them to do. At best it gets sent to a customer
| service manager, but in my experience it often gets sent to a
| black hole.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This can work. I have mixed results these days, usually down
| to issues of finding the right email addresses. I've been
| using SignalHire, but I need to use one with a deeper, more
| accurate database.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yeah, the trick is just getting to the other side of the
| "support wall". They go to great lengths to keep customers
| from wasting all their time (which frankly would indeed
| happen), but if you can get through (err, around) with a
| legitimate issue, the person on the other side usually
| cares about getting it fixed.
| ericrallen wrote:
| ISPs also have different levels of service for different
| entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
|
| An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the
| alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive
| compound) might not think it's worth coming out and marking
| their fiber lines when you call the city's 811 number to mark
| utilities before digging for a project, like a fence.
|
| If that fence ends up cutting the fiber line when digging a
| post, the company installing the fence can submit a ticket
| through a different portal than you as an actual residential
| customer of the ISP can, and that ticket probably gets
| responded to well before your attempts to contact them and
| request a call back because they are always experiencing a high
| volume of calls.
|
| They'll never admit any negligence on their part for refusing
| to mark utility lines, and you just have to remember where they
| buried the new ones, if they ever came back out to bury them
| instead of just leaving them aboive ground and flailing around.
|
| Sometimes they even try to charge you for fixing the fiber
| line.
| consp wrote:
| > and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
|
| But they do care about their monopoly (if they have a legal
| one). My approach is now to get the municipal monopoly
| contract void since they claim my home is "available" but
| they've been saying that for over four years now. They have
| the requirement to connect everyone within reasonable time.
| (note: not in the US but the same issues apply elsewhere as
| well).
| epcoa wrote:
| It's AT&T not ATNT. You could have just said it outright,
| what is the point of the obscurity? It's not funny if that's
| what you were going for.
| bavell wrote:
| Yeah pretty unnecessary, who/what are you trying to protect
| here?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, seriously. These riddles to avoid naming companies are
| so bizarre. Why do people do this? Does OP really think the
| AT&T thug squad is going to come to his house to break his
| kneecaps because he posted about them on HN?
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| As for me, it made me chuckle.
| delfinom wrote:
| >ISPs also have different levels of service for different
| entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a
| customer.
|
| Hah, we were independent and now part of a megacorp. The
| local ISP (basically a Optimum subsidiary) still does not
| care. Their ONT is still a old model that uses....volatile
| RAM for configuration, and if (and they do) fail to replace
| the backup batteries, then the configuration is wiped on
| power interruptions.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm wondering how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the
| ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable. I have a
| (expensive!) gigahertz bandwidth scope but I'm not sure what
| I'd look for on it if I connected it to my cable.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| The high capacity of an internet link does not translate
| directly into high bandwidth signals in the analog domain.
| The DOCSIS standard includes modulation patterns as high as
| 32768-QAM which allows 15 bits to be transmitted per symbol
| change. For 1Gb/s, that means that you only need <70M baud.
|
| The upstream channels are squarely in the HF to VHF range.
| The downstream channels (which typically require more
| bandwidth) start at about the same HF frequency (42MHz) but
| can extend above 1GHz. Each channel, however, is relatively
| bandwidth limited.
| netruk44 wrote:
| Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection
| issues.
|
| I phoned xfinity support who said they'd send a tech out at no
| cost to me.
|
| The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external
| apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my
| apartment.
|
| Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.
|
| I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech
| would be free. The support agent says there's nothing they can
| do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get
| a 50% discount on the fee.
|
| I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won't
| support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give
| me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25%
| discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it
| would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.
|
| I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity
| support with this same story.
|
| Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that
| if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet
| subscription active.
|
| They do so with exactly no fuss.
|
| I don't know why, but apparently publicly @'ing xfinity on
| Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually
| cancelling your internet.
| op00to wrote:
| Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but
| basically now the only effective escalation is to send a
| letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked
| for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture
| retailers, hell - even the government after some vital
| records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times
| in a row.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > via overnight mail
|
| In the USA, what is this, precisely?
| thallium205 wrote:
| FedEx
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Which is particularly effective in this day and age when
| many businesses don't handle a lot of incoming physics
| mail --- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a
| particular location and it is not like they have a
| 'mailroom' that handles this routinely, it is a non-
| routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to
| deliver something and inherently memorable.
| op00to wrote:
| Important legal documents are shipped via FedEx every
| day. Can't just ignore it like you ignore regular mail.
| op00to wrote:
| Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send
| documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as
| much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of
| someone who is not limited by stupid rules.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used
| it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App
| who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of
| the support chain."
| ct0 wrote:
| Contacting the Board of Public Utilities in NJ would have
| probably been your best bet. By law they need to start
| addressing issues within a week or so. I had some downed comms
| cable on my property that they took very seriously after
| contacting the BPU. Fixed within 2 weeks and the ISP support is
| local and senior.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| No idea about NJ, but here in NM, the PUC (Public Utilities
| Commission) says that they have authority over telephone
| service _only_ and can do nothing about internet service
| (even if it is the same company and same wire bundle).
| runjake wrote:
| The key is to look up your local city or county franchise
| agreements for ISP right-of-ways and then contact those
| people and that agency. They should be Google-able because
| they're public record. In the US, anyway.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That doesn't actually work here in my part of NM. The
| company _is_ the phone company, the wiring was installed
| on the same easements that they used to provide phone
| service. The problem is that the PUC, which controls
| phone service, has no jurisdictional authority under
| state law over internet service (and neither does any
| other state agency). At least this is what the PUC told
| us during a multiway zoom meeting between residents, the
| phone company /ISP, the PUC and two county commissioners.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to
| circumvent the useless consumer-level support
|
| Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-
| rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long
| as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith
| effort to resolve it with them beforehand.
|
| What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they
| have no reason to bother actually even providing the service.
| Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need
| to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money
| providing you with a service) to it being _their_ problem (they
| now need to convince _you_ to give them money).
|
| Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden,
| and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something
| else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with
| consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of _when_ you will need to
| do this again, not _if_ ).
| prirun wrote:
| Stopping payment sounds good, but may not work for a couple
| of reasons:
|
| 1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account,
| getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank
| told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to
| reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company
| initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank
| statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH,
| then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.
|
| 2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like
| they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high
| latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues
| than throughput, although with the severity of outage
| described in the article, high latency with no hard outage
| might be a better trade-off.
|
| 3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's
| critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to
| care less._
|
| Maybe they were doing this?
|
| https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast
| business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141's that
| stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated
| past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed 'upgrade'
| that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units
| same problem. I'm the problem using old modems says reddit.
| DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more
| sympathetic, but I still couldn't get a tech that could do
| anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183
| which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the
| upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds.
|
| After a month of getting nowhere I CC'd Brian Roberts on the
| thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day
| from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a
| corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers.
| Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service
| for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded
| service.
|
| And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on
| my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
| themafia wrote:
| The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I
| believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One
| day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly
| very high on something, went outside and started ripping
| infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could
| find with a hammer.
|
| They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did
| a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop
| problems disappeared.
| mh- wrote:
| I was merely _pretty sure_ that the comment was AI generated as
| I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when
| I noticed the username above the comment: _Gemini 3_.
|
| Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
| terminalshort wrote:
| Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an
| accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you
| are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and
| again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
| mh- wrote:
| I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree
| it's certainly better than one can get from phoning
| support.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I can't speak to the accuracy of the diagnosis, but the
| claims about NTP are bizarre, and to the best of my
| knowledge, wrong. There's nothing specific about the
| times the incidents cluster around that would have
| anything to do with NTP. It doesn't work like that.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Though, if I was the author the speculation about the
| restart time would have me breaking out a timer.
| globie wrote:
| We're talking about this line, right?
|
| >The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a
| network-synchronized clock (NTP).
|
| I think this just correctly points out that if the
| trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing
| on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't
| have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers.
| Even if the trigger was something digital but on a
| machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually
| have enough clock drift to move the events to other
| seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds
| apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.
| debtta wrote:
| Those are minutes not seconds.
| noduerme wrote:
| Customer support isn't allowed to tell you to attack the
| box with a hammer. But if they could be totally honest...
| supportengineer wrote:
| Oops, I accidentally destroyed your infrastructure with
| my car. Please roll a truck.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| "Instantly"
| supportengineer wrote:
| That's more about enhancing shareholder value than anything
| else. The MBA's need to cut those costs and keep them down
| in order to get their promotions and bonuses. The CEO needs
| another yacht by the way.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Going off on a tangent now, but man, I wish when you called
| support you could go through a quick technical competency
| test, and your results dictated who you got support from.
|
| Nailing dense questions about network infrastructure? You
| get to the engineering team.
|
| Failing to know what the "G" in 2.4GHz means? You probably
| just need someone to tell you to restart your router.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Our city fiber support is awesome and I've had luck in
| the past with telling the frontline tech that I likely
| needed to talk to one of the senior techs, and getting
| immediately escalated. I don't remember the exact problem
| I was having, but it was something slightly tricky that I
| had done extensive investigation on before calling.
| ce4 wrote:
| Relevant xkcd:
|
| https://xkcd.com/806/
| vedmed wrote:
| My brother ran the article through gemini and left that
| comment
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sometimes, the truth can be a letdown. Everyone was hoping
| it was LLMs all the way down. ;)
|
| I am _very_ fortunate to have two competing ISPs in my
| area. Verizon Fios, and Optimum Fibre. I have played them
| against each other. I have had both, over the years. I am
| currently using Optimum.
|
| Still not especially cheap, but the service is good. The
| _customer_ service ... not so good (think South Park).
| matt123456789 wrote:
| I think it was someone trying to help and being cheeky about
| it.
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| you've obviously never used AI much then, because I was able
| to instantly tell that it's a summarisation typical of
| claude/gemini/copilot
| econ wrote:
| Damned if you do, more damned if you don't.
|
| I do suggest using high voltage rather than a hammer.
| Thorrez wrote:
| You can put whatever name you want there when you post a
| comment. You don't need to have a registered account.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| Did the neighbor get in trouble or was this a mom-stealing-
| baby-food-and-diapers kind of witnessing?
| komali2 wrote:
| Or was it "the neighbor" in the same way that "my friend" has
| a weed hookup?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Strongly doubt anyone fessed up to the destruction. "Came out
| this morning and some hooligans must have done it in the
| night"
| esseph wrote:
| That's a felony in the US by the way, and most will prosecute
| if they have enough evidence of who it was.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Thing is, even if the neighbors saw something, they didn't
| see anything when the cops come knocking because _everyone_
| is most likely pissed off as well and happy someone is
| finally doing something that forces attention.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I find it hard to think of an industry more universally
| hated than telcos/cable/phone companies so good luck
| finding a snitch.
| fransje26 wrote:
| For-profit health insurance companies?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I wonder if they would top it actually. The need to
| interact with health insurance mostly scales with age,
| where as the shittiness of an consumer-grade telco is
| constant.
| razingeden wrote:
| >frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on
| something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out
| by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a
| hammer
|
| hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm
| springs.
| patrickmay wrote:
| So much for the platitude that violence never solves anything.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 1. get a starlink.
|
| 2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from
| their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres
| problems.
|
| your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt
| what theyre targeting.
|
| 3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing
| the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared
| across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example
| coax lines running to other customers will send noise back
| upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent
| cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and
| crawlspace.
|
| coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix.
| all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of
| expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending
| cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre
| deprioritized.
|
| nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal
| levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as
| they get paid by the fed to do it.
|
| the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and
| are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a
| different service.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| 1. Starlink is not an alternative for 1Gbps cable. It's slower
| with higher latency. It uses CGNAT which limits what you can do
| with it.
|
| 2. Can you provide a source for that?
|
| 3. According to the article, the neighbor has the same issue
| with the same timing. So it's not the modem or inside wiring.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I
| had a similar issue with WOW.
| gxs wrote:
| Not this bad of a situation but I've successfully gotten them to
| escalate to the network engineers who were able to help
|
| Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact
| with a network engineer would be helpful
|
| Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes
| they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve
| your issue
| j2kun wrote:
| The US gov't broke up AT&T and killed Bell Labs for this, so at
| least they owe us to bust this monopoly
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I hate this meme that "government banning monopolies will solve
| everything". It's especially non sensical in this case or in
| the AT&T analogy. The baby bells still had a local monopoly in
| their region and cities only had one phone provider - the baby
| bell.
|
| The case is the same here. Even if you broke up the cable
| monopoly so they all became regional companies, you still won't
| have a choice but for one cable/internet provider in that same
| location unless the local phone company decides to compete and
| lay fiber.
| chmod775 wrote:
| When you need a company like that to do something, figure out
| what they're afraid of.
|
| The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the
| government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday,
| raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen:
| FCC, local politicians, etc.
|
| You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government
| workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a
| single phone call.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| That's the problem in my country. They're not afraid of anyone.
| It's a true duopoly here. There's no FCC to complain to, I
| guess the most you can do is weasel your way out of your
| contract but that leaves you with no internet. Local
| politicians don't give two shits (nor do they have any power).
| You could switch to a different provider, but their network is
| either copper (aka low speeds and unstable) or fiber (which is
| a hollow promise right now - there just isn't any fiber in my
| area).
| paulnpace wrote:
| They fear juries (jurors, really).
| layla5alive wrote:
| I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity
| on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building.
|
| But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different
| times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by
| Gemini, in my case).
|
| I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent
| anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast
| Business prices.
|
| I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for
| both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was
| basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but
| they were always down at different, non-overlapping times.
|
| My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or
| not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot
| of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
| netbioserror wrote:
| Couldn't cell or Starlink substitute in this day and age? 5G
| cells are pretty prolific now. So even if you might not want to
| actually leave, it's a perfectly good threat and functions as
| competition in their eyes.
| vedmed wrote:
| I tried to leave just a few days ago and use a Mint Mobile
| Wireless Internet. But then I found that I had to be double-
| natted and my reverse proxy didn't work so I would have to give
| up my servers and VPN.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Nope. Usually much slower with higher latency, and CGNAT limits
| what you can do with your connection. Starlink uses CGNAT and
| some mobile carriers do as well.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| My cable internet was down for 3 weeks after a maintenance, they
| sent out someone 2 times. We had an irc channel where engineers
| from most of the countrys isps were in, but not this isp, but
| then i remember that there was a guy consulting for them. Took
| him 5 minutes to fix it, it was a problem with my speed profile
| (increased upload plan) and I was the only one in my area that
| was on it.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| I got a problem with my AT&T Fiber service at the house. We pay
| for a 500 Mbps plan, and I can get 600 Mbps up and down via
| ethernet on speedtest (probably due to over provisioning).
| However, I can only download stuff about 8 MB/s from most places.
| I believe this to be an internal issue as whenever I connect to
| any VPN service, I can get the full 600 Mbps. Furthermore, some
| servers are able to serve me at full speed, but this is rare.
| Usually GitHub git servers can upload to me at full speed, while
| GitHub tar balls are uploaded to me at about 8 MB/s.
|
| Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with
| ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at
| all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?
| ted_dunning wrote:
| If you can't document your attempts to document and resolve the
| issue in your FCC complaint it will have far less credibility.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| Ok, thank you! I'm gonna gather as much documentation as I
| can.
|
| Considering the fact that I get full speeds everywhere
| whenever I'm using a VPN, am I right to assume that there is
| an issue with AT&T's internal routing? And, that issue
| doesn't effect every path? I'm not really an expert at doing
| networking stuff, but I wanna gather as much empirical data
| to construct a report and do statistical tests n stuff.
| ycombiredd wrote:
| My first guess wouldn't be routing, but traffic-shaping.
|
| Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't
| outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your
| tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it
| avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN
| connection is subjected to.
| toast0 wrote:
| You can't see everything from your own connection, but you
| can see a lot.
|
| Take some pcaps of downloads that don't work. See if
| there's some common thing going on. Are you getting packets
| slowly with minimal loss or are there many missing packets?
| Does it seem like a path MTU issue [1]? Is the RTT
| reasonable?
|
| Traceroutes from your side aren't the most helpful, but see
| what's the same and different between download IPs that
| work well and those that don't. If we assume congestion is
| from the internet to you, traceroutes from the download
| servers that don't work would be most useful, but that's
| hard to get. Sometimes you can find a hosting provider with
| test download urls and a looking glass, which can be pretty
| helpful _if_ that 's what you're experiencing.
|
| Definitely look at ipv4 and ipv6. It's pretty common to get
| different routing between the same two endpoints on v4 and
| v6, so you get more debugging.
|
| If it is a routing problem, be sure you're testing same IPs
| for download between native and VPN, if you download by
| hostname and the DNS resolves differently, try both IPs
| both ways... maybe you're just getting poor selection from
| DNS which can be addressed in different wayss. If your
| native DNS always gives you cross country servers and your
| VPN is local and gets local servers, there you go.
|
| But if you do figure out the problem, you also need to find
| a way to escalate. Chances are phone support isn't going to
| be super helpful. Explore reddit to see if people get
| results there, find out what the replacement for dslreports
| is, etc.
|
| Edit to add: when you do reach out, you want to share a
| concise summary and easy to repeat test; not so much all
| the research you did behind it. But ... that test should
| include multiple sources for the download or support will
| say it's a single site issue and close the ticket.
|
| [1] I always blame PMTU, what does my test here show
| http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ If you don't get OK in all the
| boxes, that could be part of the problem... But that's
| usually slow start, not slow throughput after starting.
| rft wrote:
| At this point escalating, or threatening to, might be the
| better option. But I can't help trying to figure out how to
| solve a people/organizational problem with a technological
| solution.
|
| Github is still famously IPv4 only. I don't know if there is a
| split between the SSH (if you use SSH to access the repos) and
| HTTPS (the tarballs) setup on their end, so maybe you get full
| speed on IPv6 and limited on IPv4 (or the other way around).
| Try disabling IPv6 on your end, if the speeds match then this
| might be it. If IPv6 is fast using an IPv4 gateway that tunnels
| via an IPv6 VPN might be a workaround.
|
| I also had a similar problem a while back. Some speedtests
| showed more bandwidth than I could get in regular HTTPS
| downloads. I could get multiple downloads running at the same
| time that in total added up to the expected speed. In my case
| the line was just lossy enough (TCP retransmits in Wireshark)
| for TCP to never scale up its window size properly beyond a
| certain limit per connection. I verified this by running iperf
| in TCP and UDP against a gigabit server, UDP reached near full
| speed because it didn't care about a few lost packages. Working
| around that issue might be a bit harder, maybe [1] via [2] can
| provide some ideas to look into.
|
| [1] https://github.com/apernet/tcp-brutal
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38164574
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| > I also had a similar problem a while back. Some speedtests
| showed more bandwidth than I could get in regular HTTPS
| downloads. I could get multiple downloads running at the same
| time that in total added up to the expected speed
|
| Yes, this is behavior I am seeing on my end too. On Arch
| Linux, I enabled parallel downloads for updates via pacman.
| Whenever updating my system, I can saturate my connection,
| but as soon as I get down to one huge package, like
| wallpapers or rocm-llvm, the download speed for that package
| is only 8 MB/s.
| efitz wrote:
| Large service providers hate you. Not just you; they hate all
| humans, especially those that they have to pay or those that cost
| them money.
|
| They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They
| literally don't want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means
| that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay
| them in a month.
|
| The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people
| who can do more than just read a script "did you unplug it and
| plug it back in?"
|
| Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don't let
| things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The
| algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the
| local government that you can vote out), and so "bad enough" is
| pretty bad compared to a place with real competition.
|
| It sucks, but there it is.
|
| Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent
| them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they
| just don't know how to deal with that kind of thing.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I'm with you. They should all be prosecuted the hell out of
| djhedges wrote:
| Reminds me of the cable internet I had in college. Every night it
| would drop for several minutes at a time. My homework included
| cisco labs using equipment we had to reserve remotely so loosing
| my SSH connections was maddening.
|
| Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was
| logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength.
| Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem
| went away, they said another tech would come back out and check
| on it.
|
| One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month
| money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day
| to the dismay of the receptionist.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Have you tried turning it off and on again?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Apparently the people downvoting haven't watched The IT Crowd
| TV series. It was a joke.
| yaur wrote:
| You need to get someone out there. Just tell them over and over
| again its an outside wiring problem and demand they dispatch a
| tech. the tech will have different phone numbers with people that
| sort of know what they are doing. At least this worked before
| chat gpt ate the world.
| Jolter wrote:
| Sounds to me like they already had at least three on-site
| visits by technicians.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Germany/Vodafone: A couple of years ago my DOCSIS connection that
| worked flawlessly for years started to fail in almost the same
| pattern. All reporting and support communication went nowhere,
| had to use the procedure by German IT/Telco regulator to cancel
| my contract early. It sucked because VDSL is slower but Vodafone
| wasn't interested in fixing.
|
| They claim something/someone in the curb is interfering but
| neither trace it down nor fix it.
| 7bit wrote:
| Fuck Vodafone Germany in particular. I had a cable-contract
| that was rock solid for years until it wasn't. No amount of
| calls and complaints was able to convince them to do anything.
|
| First, it was clearly a problem in the house.
|
| Weeks later it suddenly was a regional issue that needed
| massive infrastructure updates.
|
| Then it became a problem caused by a single household creating
| massive interference, that they need to find.
|
| Months later they went back to infrastructure updates.
|
| After 9 months of this shit I reported the issue to
| Bundesnetzagentur.
|
| My next call to Vodafone and they "suddenly" offer to reduce my
| monthly subscription fee. After threatening to call the BNetzA
| again, they also offered to payback part of the fees of the
| previous 9 months.
|
| The problem was magically resolved 3 months later. I'm on the
| reduced monthly fee ever since. They have forgotten to raise it
| back to normal and I'm not reminding them about it because they
| have been such assholes about it.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Cable TV is so bad to debug as it is not following a star
| topology in larger houses. What's even worse: We have FTTB by
| the city carrier since 2009 but no efforts have been made to
| provide FTTH in-house. Recently they started an offer for
| retrofitting but as every flat is owned by a different party
| and nobody knows the difference in between FTTB+g.fast and
| FTTH, I gave up. Boomers and digital naives own our country.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I don't call Vodafone Wurgdafone for no reason lol.
|
| When on a business contract it's ok, but private contracts? Oh
| hell have they been plagued with scandals.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Infrastructure is difficult. I have to run 2 ISPs these days.
| FTTP and DOCSIS.
|
| The fiber line is obviously my primary and it's completely
| flawless when it's working. The problem is that about once or
| twice a year a utility contractor will break the fiber in my
| neighborhood and it can go out for up to 2 days. Cellular service
| is not sufficient to cover. The cable connection is what I use
| when the fiber goes down hard like that. I don't bother with a
| multi-WAN router or anything. It's a manual cutover thing. The
| cable can obviously go down too, but it follows a different path
| (power lines vs buried). The cable is more likely to go out, but
| it can be resolved more quickly assuming a localized incident.
|
| I was looking at using starlink for backup, but there are caveats
| with satellite connectivity in the woods.
| runjake wrote:
| What caveats? It sounds like Starlink would be a perfect backup
| and likely save you a lot of money.
| hylaride wrote:
| Satellite signals are low power and rely on line of sight. If
| he's properly in the woods, especially surrounded by hills,
| the trees could become a hinderance.
| jliptzin wrote:
| My home is in the woods. Took me a while to switch to
| Starlink because it was difficult to get line of sight.
| Eventually, Xfinity pissed me off so much that I was
| willing to move heaven and earth to move to Starlink. I
| ended up running a 300 foot cat6 cable through a pond to
| the back of my property to the only place I'd get line of
| sight and it's been working great. If you have to pay
| someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish so it's above
| the tree line, it's well worth it.
| ipkstef wrote:
| I had to step back for my own sanity when dealing with similar
| issues with xfinity, had multiple FCC cases open and they just
| lied their way through it with no impunity.
|
| OP if you're organizing let me know I have a burning fire passion
| for xfinity to get their just desserts
| vedmed wrote:
| Do you have any ideas on how to leverage such organization to
| effectuate change?
|
| It would sure be great to have internet classified as a public
| utility.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Start by never voting for deregulation
| jlubawy wrote:
| The periodic resets could also be watchdog timer related (without
| knowing what level their hardware is running on). Too long of a
| loop without resetting the timer (in a long loop), then the
| hardware also gets reset.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| In the UK we are lucky to have a bit better of the system -
| Openreach (or Virgin) own the cables, and ISPs pay Openreach to
| do the transit. IP based not dark fibre unfortunately.
|
| That said, most ISPs won't escalate when there's an OR problem,
| or at least take a long time to, and then the OR tech is usually
| just trained to test the cable coming in and not a lot else.
|
| I used to be with Andrew's and Arnold (run by @revk who surfaces
| around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while
| expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood
| your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your
| behalf.
| b800h wrote:
| I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.
| fucalost wrote:
| It feels so odd (in a good way!) to see people talking about
| A&A - I recommend them to everyone I know, they're truly
| excellent.
| Aachen wrote:
| What's an or problem or tech? A web search gives predictably
| nothing
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Openreach. The infrastructure provider
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| In the context of UK infrastructure, "OR" is an abbreviation
| of "Openreach", part of the BT Group that is responsible for
| the infrastructure from ducts and poles to street cabinets
| and exchange buildings. It is not an organisation that an end
| user can access for support and is charged by ISPs to repair,
| upgrade and install additions to large parts the
| telecommunications network. It can be difficult to convince
| one's ISP to have Openreach investigate a physical fault or
| bottleneck, unless that ISP is the aforementioned Andrews and
| Arnold who literally implemented automated methods to
| repeatedly bounce faults back to Openreach when the latter
| insists on erroneously rejecting faults. Makes for
| entertaining reading :-)
| uoaei wrote:
| Name and shame!!! Charter, Cox, Comcast... all are ridiculously
| user-hostile.
| econ wrote:
| >Everyone downstream of whatever is broken on their
| infrastructure probably has it too.
|
| Probably?
| vedmed wrote:
| Being careful not to make claims I can't prove.
| sp0ck wrote:
| You have an option. Starlink. If you are not FPS player you will
| be really happy. There are service interruption, but they are
| very rare (at least for me). Just drop single ping here and
| there.
| motbus3 wrote:
| The always caressing hand of the free market and no regulations.
|
| I've been through this multiple times. A lawyer friend of mine
| told me that in such cases only going through a legal battle
| would solve the problem but the amount of money and time for the
| zero return will get no interest of any lawyers.
|
| You'll be out of luck unless yourself are a lawyer or you know
| someone being affected who is up to this tedious battle
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| I am reminded of the troubles my parents experienced with their
| phone service when I was a kid. We lived out in the country,
| and every time it rained the lines would pick up horrific
| static. It was too much to have a voice conversation, let alone
| support the (slow) dial up Internet we used.
|
| A multitude of technicians came out and apologetically said
| there was a problem somewhere in a line, but they couldn't get
| approval to really dig in because there just weren't enough
| complaints - they theorized there was just one broken line
| somewhere in a bundle that water would seep in to, and we drew
| the short straw.
|
| Finally, one technician very quietly suggested that my parents
| go to the phonebook and call the state public utilities
| regulation commission. I still remember that their number was
| found on the one blue page in the telephone book.
|
| Within a few business days, there were half a dozen lineman out
| stringing new lines, and a supervisor apologizing to my
| parents, promising the issue would be fixed that day, and
| giving his direct line to them with the instructions to call if
| they ever had phone trouble again.
|
| My dad generally distrusts the government, but still marvels at
| that response to this day.
| immibis wrote:
| It's way easier than you'd think to start an ISP - at least if
| you're content to only provide internet to datacenter servers.
| That's a competitive market. You can buy switches and routers and
| servers, rent colo space, rent leased lines between DCs, pay for
| internet access from some upstreams and IXes and sell internet
| access to others in the same DCs. It's still difficult but it's
| possible, even for an individual. And you won't make any money on
| that because it's a competitive market.
|
| The real challenge is then getting that access out to all the
| surrounding individual homes and businesses. Laying fiber in
| streets or overhead can be legally difficult and it's also just a
| ton of physical labour.
|
| If any millionaires or mad scientists are reading this and
| frustrated with their own internet access, though, please give it
| a try. There are tons of success stories where someone just
| created a small ISP to free their small town from an internet
| monopoly that everyone hated.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Hosting and connectivity by itself is a really efficient cash
| incinerator - the only way out is to use it as a loss leader
| and then upsell the customers on other services, or sell them
| the connectivity as part of a greater package (you're no longer
| selling "connectivity" you're selling "we maintain and make
| sure your web service stays online and reachable").
| immibis wrote:
| I'm estimating you'll make a profit once you figure out a way
| to plug thousands of individual homes into your loss-making
| backbone, and execute on it.
|
| However, the incumbent monopoly might lower prices and
| improve service quality to match yours. Which is almost
| mission accomplished, except for the losses you'll be
| making...
| hexo wrote:
| Sue them.
| vedmed wrote:
| I probably will but my monetary loss is so negligible they wont
| care.
|
| There's another article on that site about how I sued Subaru of
| America for covering up an octane issue.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I spent years with DSL because xfinoty was the only option and
| when I tried to use them tgey tried to charge me to install a
| compatible modem that had zero requirements except flipping a
| switch. I walked into their store.
| ksec wrote:
| I am reading this and thinking why does it sound familiar. And
| then only learned Xfinity means Cable / DOCSIS. Edit: I wish the
| title could be edited as _Cable_ ISP.
|
| _It is a common problem with DOCSIS! And has been the case since
| 1.0 era._ DO NOT use Cable if you can.
|
| It happens when it is over subscribed, as well as other radio
| interference. Although common cause is over subscription. You may
| actually try downgrading your speed / DOCSIS 2.0 / 3.0 to see if
| it helps.
|
| Funny enough with G.Fast, had they continue the investment
| running 1Gbps on telephone cable would have still been better
| than DOCSIS.
|
| I used to fight this before I got my fibre optic. Even 5G
| Internet is better than DOCSIS. For people who have never been
| through this, you will quickly learn the one thing most important
| with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is
| reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL
| connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly
| dropping off.
|
| I dont know about US, but in most places on earth Government
| seems to be ok to mandate electricity and water as well as
| telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical
| Fibre as standard as well. And it seems most property agency
| refuse to put internet connection speed and types on the property
| pages. If consumer could easily learn without optical fibre
| equals shitty property and refuse to buy or rent the land lord
| will have interest to quickly act upon it.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| interesting the article mentions his speeds dropped. I wonder
| if someone at support knows this but knows there's nothing they
| can really do to fix the issues?
| neelc wrote:
| At the present moment I live in a place in NYC without fiber.
| Manhattan row townhomes are notoriously hard for Verizon to
| install FiOS in. I chose 5G over DOCSIS simply because of
| upload speeds.
|
| T-Mobile (both TMHI and Calyx Sprout SIM) has 40-75 Mbps
| uploads versus 20-35 on Spectrum.
|
| It also helps that I use a L2TP VPN to a BGP VPS to get myself
| a public IPv4, otherwise I'd have Spectrum for no CGNAT.
|
| Yes, I'd much rather have fiber with symmetrical speeds and low
| latency. Heck, if Spectrum had high split or even mid split I'd
| have that.
|
| Cable hyped their "10G" upgrades but it's basically vaporware
| while non-cable ISPs actually showed up with fiber and/or 5G.
| Trump's tariffs are also punishing cable ISPs.
| icedchai wrote:
| I had packet loss on my DOCSIS connection for years, on-and-
| off. The upstream speed would also regularly drop below a
| megabit. It became a problem for remote work.
|
| I complained regularly, and always had "techs" come out. They
| would usually claim it was my splitter or my modem. I suggested
| they go outside and test the line from the street. They'd then
| confirm the loss was present on the line outside, then escalate
| it to the "outside guys" (plant or whatever.) It would be fixed
| for a month or two, then come back.
|
| Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the
| neighborhood. Cable is NOT reliable.
| driverdan wrote:
| > Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into
| the neighborhood.
|
| Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as
| standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as
| standard as well
|
| Electricity and water was mandated at the time the government
| mostly did right by the people and wasn't yet (fully) captured
| by corporate interests. By the time the internet arrived this
| was no longer the case.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| If people actually read history books we'd make much better
| decisions as a society.
|
| No. Water and electricity were not mandated in a magical past
| where the government was awesome. The government has been
| captured by corporations and special interests forever. The
| level of corruption in the 1800s was astronomical compared to
| today.
|
| People fought for those rights. Often literally. And they
| still don't exist in some places.
|
| Arkansas just passed a law that you need a working roof,
| electricity, heat and water, in 2021.
|
| So no. Sitting around lamenting a past that never existed
| won't get us anywhere.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I don't think that an awareness of the past is suggested
| because the past was great. I think it's because seemingly
| good ideas weren't, so it's a chance to avoid repeating
| mistakes.
| qwerasdf5 wrote:
| Glad to hear that Arkansas now has working roofs,
| electricity, heat, and water. Must've been weird before
| 2021.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yeah, here in the US there are geographically tiny pockets in a
| few major cities that have actual fiber. Most of the country,
| including a shocking number of dense urban areas outside the
| east coast, has zero fiber penetration. Of our two telephone
| monopolies, one installed fiber for 10 years and quit (the East
| Coast one), and the other basically never installed fiber to
| the home.
|
| So anyway, outside that lucky group we all use cable only
| because the alternative is, in many places, 6Mbps ADSL on aging
| and flaky copper wires. Or potentially 12Mbps... VDSL? AT&T
| branded that as U-Verse for a while. But basically they ceded
| the market to the cable companies.
| bavell wrote:
| This talking point may be a bit outdated now... I'm in a
| small suburban area in the southeast with 5Gb fiber available
| from AT&T. Around 500k in my municipal area (50k in the city
| proper).
| ryandrake wrote:
| You're probably just in one of those "geographically tiny
| pockets in a few major cities."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I live in a place that's rather difficult to serve and I'm
| just past the range where the full 24 Mbps ADSL2 speed is
| available so I get 20 Mbps. Once in a while my telco has
| infrastructure problems, it uses to be common that there
| would be lightning or power outages and it wouldn't come back
| until they did some kind of manual reset, I talked w/ them
| and the PUC about it and then it seemed like they set it up
| so it would do an automated reset. The techs tell me if I
| lived very close to the node they could set me up with much
| faster VDSL.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Isn't this particular failure mode applicable to any TDMA
| technology (of which even GPON fiber is one) when the
| contention ratios become too high?
|
| The issue is that the ISP selling services beyond what that
| physical network segment can provide, and it being effectively
| legal to sell something and not deliver it if you're a big
| enough corporation and only scam consumers.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as
| well.
|
| The incumbents have been lobbying against this heavily, winning
| state laws banning municipalities from setting up their own
| fiber in some places.
| massysett wrote:
| Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy
| network connectivity. It's up to my network provider to
| determine the best means to do that. I don't care if it's tin
| can and string if it provides the service I need.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Mostly because we're pushing the limits of long-range
| copper to offer currently-standard bandwidth levels, where
| as fiber is just getting started (you can go to 100Gbit on
| the same fiber by just swapping the optics at either end).
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Also deploying copper is much more expensive than dirt
| cheap fiber optic
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable,
| speedy network connectivity._
|
| The second sentence answers the question.
|
| > _It's up to my network provider to determine the best
| means to do that. I don't care if it's tin can and string
| if it provides the service I need._
|
| You assume that your network provider wants to provide
| "reliable, speedy network connectivity" and not "maximize
| profits with the smallest possible outlay".
|
| Given they already have a bunch 'legacy' infrastructure,
| they're going to try to milk that existing plant as much as
| possible before shelling out another dime on anything new.
| That is not a recipe for "reliable, speedy network
| connectivity".
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't
| Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far
| better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps
| Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.
|
| Please don't assume everyone's usecase is the same as yours. I
| would pay dearly to have an unreliable but FAST connection just
| to get away from my 6Mbps DSL.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| YMMV and this probably heavily depends on the provider and
| location, but in my experience, at multiple locations, cable is
| rock solid, generally delivering close to advertised speed.
|
| Sure, they might be a short (<1h) outage once or twice per
| year, but even fiber infrastructure is not immune to this.
| pimeys wrote:
| Well... We had a ton of issues with DOCSIS until a few years
| ago, when they built fiber to the nearby pole, and the cable
| is just a few meters inside the house to the street. Before
| it used to break all the time.
|
| Yeah, they will eventually bring fiber to the apartment. This
| is Germany anyhow, it will happen in the next 10-30 years.
| LeonM wrote:
| Story time!
|
| I've had a very similar problem with my cable internet circa
| 2010. It must have been DOCSIS 3.0. Multiple times a day my
| connection would stop working completely. The modem's 'connected'
| and 'carrier up' and 'carrier down' lights were on, and I had LAN
| communication with the modem, but no data would pass though on
| the WAN side.
|
| From the management page of the modem (I later learned you
| weren't supposed to know about) I could see the upstream and
| downstream carriers were correctly established and still
| operational, but on the IP (PPPoE) level the TX (upstream) packet
| counter was increasing, but the RX (downstream) packet counter
| did not. Releasing the IP on my router (remember, it was PPPoE),
| then waiting 10 minutes or so before renewing the IP via DHCP
| would bring connectivity back.
|
| I would call to my ISP (the largest ISP in my country) to try to
| resolve the issue. Every. Single. Time. I had to explain to the
| support employee that yes, I did disconnect and reconnect power,
| yes, my computer's software was up to date, yes, I did try
| connecting via LAN directly to the modem to eliminate any
| possible router issues, etc.
|
| Now, at this point in the story I should point out that I held a
| degree in electrical engineering, specialising in embedded
| systems and high-speed data transmission and also had just about
| all Cisco networking certifications. I was more than qualified to
| design cable modems myself, imagine the frustration wasn't able
| to fix this issue.
|
| One night I came home to the same problem, called customer
| service again, fully prepared to do the 'dance' of answering
| every basic troubleshooting question. But to my surprise, the guy
| on the phone seemed legit knowledgable. When I described him the
| symptoms I saw from the modem's management page he was rather
| surprised that I managed to discover that functionality, but said
| he knew what the problem would be then.
|
| The support employee was quickly to confirm that someone in my
| neighbourhood hard-coded his IP-address instead of allowing DHCP
| (a common trick back in the day to get a static IP on a
| residential cable connection), and that that IP was clashing with
| the IP their DHCP would assign to my router's MAC address. He
| asked me what brand of router I had, and had to explain to him
| that it was a self-built OpenBSD box. His response was: "great!
| then you probably know how to spoof the MAC on your WAN interface
| then?". I did, I changed my MAC to a value he gave me, and
| immediately my connection came back up. He explained me that any
| MAC address starting with AB:BA (named after the band) was
| reserved for a special block of customers with this kind of
| issue.
|
| We continued chatting a bit about DOCSIS, networking technology,
| modulation types, OpenBSD (it was also his favourite OS) and much
| more nerdy stuff. At some point I asked him, respectfully, how
| someone with his knowledge ended up at the support helpdesk of an
| ISP. He then told me he was the ISP's CTO, in charge of all
| network operations, and that he was just manning the helpdesk
| while his colleagues were on a diner break...
| ptidhomme wrote:
| Man, I remember when you told this story some years ago, and I
| still very much like it ! (I have an hnrss.org feed with all
| comments mentioning OpenBSD, so, I was bound to catch it).
| shevy-java wrote:
| Another example why monopolies are bad.
| reactordev wrote:
| Bet you wished we passed net neutrality and made these monopolies
| common carriers now don't you? The moment you saw the state of
| the junction should have told you everything you need to know and
| I would do everything to get out of Xfinity. Starlink is a great
| choice if you don't have hosting requirements. I empathize
| because there's regions in the US that have one 1 provider.
| You're kinda screwed.
|
| Worst is Xfinity will do everything to blame it on you including
| charge you, the customer, for new cable lines and junction box.
| Rusted out splitters is also common.
| phkahler wrote:
| Starlink is available planet wide.
| joelthelion wrote:
| (not from the US) If xfinity sucks so much, could you try
| switching to a different provider?
| manifoldgeo wrote:
| Xfinity has a massive market share and is often the only game
| in town or one of only two. The only alternatives are often
| smaller resellers of the exact same infrastructure under a
| different company name. Or, there's also satellite Internet,
| but it's an order of magnitude slower, has a low data cap, and
| costs at least as much as the others.
|
| Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own
| ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster
| support:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...
| kro wrote:
| A German ISP also has an IP6 issue and confirmed it over the
| phone but is not fixing it. It persists for years and can be
| observed on multiple households I checked.
|
| Most don't notice it, as refreshing the address or happyeyeballs
| works around it.
| supportengineer wrote:
| This post tells me that I could leave the Bay Area and move to
| Sacramento and buy a much better cheaper house and still be able
| to find smart technical people.
|
| I also recently dumped Xfinity cable modem service. It was
| reliable for 10 years and then all of a sudden it wasn't.
| neilv wrote:
| Comcast/Xfinity did a major upgrade of my neighborhood a few
| weeks ago, and now I'm getting similar-sounding intermittent
| outages multiple times a day... but that's not what infuriated
| me, and not what they will regret.
|
| As a technologist, I could understand there are a variety of
| possible causes, some not their fault, but then they had to go
| and be unambiguously jerky...
|
| My mistake was contacting support, about what seemed like a port-
| filtering problem after they temporarily backed out the upgrade.
| After I was forwarded to the wrong kind of CSR, so I cut that
| short, apparently (I learned later) the CSR slammed me into a
| more expensive plan, and also video streaming.
|
| After I realized I got slammed, and got into a support chat to
| undo that... I got what seemed to be a highly-skilled jerking-
| around, for literally an hour, where they kept trying a large set
| of dirty tricks, never just canceling the new things and giving
| me back the plan I'd had hours earlier. I finally told them that
| they needed to undo the slamming, and to email me confirming
| they're done that, since I would not be contacting Comcast again,
| and would instead call the AG's office and regulators. No email
| came, and then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid
| themselves the fraudulent bill.
|
| I'm sure the dirty tricks call center person preserved their
| dirty tricks metrics for the day. And, further up the org chart,
| the rest of the machine continued to run in the default sketchy
| profit-maximizing (and, more to the point, individual-bonuses-
| and-promotions-maximizing) ways.
|
| So I think the first step is to leverage remaining good
| government, to _make the company regret multiples of every dollar
| they 've made by behaving this way to everyone_, not only to me.
| Of course, making a company feel significant pain still won't
| directly end the problem, until either shareholders make CEOs and
| boards feel pain personally, or until more executives are
| criminally held responsible for knowingly leading criminal
| behavior of companies -- but making the balance sheet feel pain
| will be a start.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Edit: apologies, missed the "a few weeks ago" and didn't
| realize it was still an ongoing matter. Please disregard.
|
| ---
|
| Original comment:
|
| > then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves
| the fraudulent bill.
|
| And yet you let them do it, didn't recall the payment, and
| seemingly didn't even follow up on the threat?
|
| Looks like mission accomplished for them, of course the
| customer service monkey is going to do this again and everyone
| else will also happily look the other way while it's happening.
|
| Yes, corporation-on-consumer-fraud becoming de-facto legal is a
| major problem (that is unlikely to be something the current US
| government will address), but it mostly relies on fear/apathy
| and 90% of people caving in and paying (like you did);
| disputing the payment is easy and then the ball goes into their
| court and _they_ must prove you agreed to this new contract
| /upgrade (which they can't) if they want to get paid.
| neilv wrote:
| How did you read that? This is an ongoing situation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Edited, my bad, I need to read more carefully.
| wdr1 wrote:
| One nice thing about Starlink is it gives an alternative to what
| used to be monopoly ISPs.
| tlb wrote:
| Some bean counter at Xfiniti is reading this and moaning about
| how this one customer is using a disproportionate share of tech
| support time.
| anon7000 wrote:
| This story is so relatable it hurts. The amount of my time ISP
| executives have wasted by their malicious decision to absolutely
| gut "technical" support... It should be illegal to run a
| "support" department where most agents don't understand the bare
| minimum of basics about how the internet works.
|
| I've had issues like this with all 3 of my past 3 ISPs, which
| included Comcast, Astound (WaveG), and CenturyLink. The last two
| are even gigabit fiber...
|
| Astound had an issue where their upstream device wouldn't let me
| get an IPv6 address (despite allegedly supporting it) and some
| packet sniffing revealed a specific issue that of course no
| support could help with. So any customer in this building will
| continue having that problem. Anyways, I ultimately canceled
| service after they had a 36 hour outage in the summer with no
| storms. And this was in downtown Seattle -- the two closest
| buildings are a god damned datacenter and Amazon offices.
|
| CenturyLink was slightly better... but I noticed after signing up
| for the service that the fiber line going to their ONT had a bad
| kink in it which obviously breaks fiber. It took me like 5 chats
| and a couple phone calls to get them to send a technician, and
| even then, the technician said I was lucky they sent the _only
| person_ who had and knew how to use the fiber splicer thing...
| That shouldn't be fucking lucky! Every single person I talked to
| knew I needed my fiber line to be spliced because I told them
| exactly what the problem and fix was. Absolutely absurd.
|
| Executives should be punished for making customer service
| categorically awful, and yet they simply get promotions and
| bonuses for making it cheaper. I hope every exec who decided to
| make customer support useless could have these stories shoved
| down their throats for the rest of their lives.
| craftkiller wrote:
| > It should be illegal to run a "support" department where most
| agents don't understand the bare minimum of basics about how
| the internet works.
|
| Recently when Optimum in NYC broke their IPv6, only 1 out of
| the 5 tech support people I talked to knew what IPv6 is. None
| of them fixed the problem. The problem resolved after a couple
| of days, so I assume someone finally noticed their
| infrastructure was broken. Incredibly frustrating to deal with
| an impenetrable wall of incompetence.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My ISP (Frontier) struggles enough with the basics that the
| last thing I want to do is bring up IPv6.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I am in Africa - getting 100Mbps/100Mbps symmetric fiber to my
| home. This is frankly terrible for the biggest economy in the
| world.
| anonym29 wrote:
| As someone who's lived in 10 different units/houses across 6
| different US states, who values decent connectivity, Xfinity or
| Charter/Spectrum being the only gigabit-speed wired home internet
| service providers is an instant, non-negotiable deal-breaker for
| a prospective property for me these days.
|
| These companies continuing to offer service this unreliable and
| terrible is not unlike the GM fiasco of the FWD X platform in the
| 80s1, where the company deliberately attempted to conceal faulty
| brakes that led to the deaths of over a hundred people while
| still selling the affected vehicles.
|
| The advertising these companies perform regarding this defective
| service amounts to fraud.
|
| The country would be a better place if Xfinity and
| Charter/Spectrum simply ceased existing such that sufficient
| demand for reliable modern fiber infrastructure became too
| powerful of a market force to ignore in regions previously
| dominated by these incompetent-bordering-on-negligent parasitic
| fraudsters.
|
| 1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_X_platform_(FWD...
| jliptzin wrote:
| Yep, I knew this was Comcast/Xfinity just seeing the title. I had
| the exact same problem, for years. Intermittent disconnects for a
| few minutes at a time, multiple times a day. I must have had
| upwards of 50 technicians come to my house, all insisting there
| was some problem with the wiring in my house (there wasn't) or
| the router or whatever (hardware all replaced multiple times
| including the wiring). Eventually after years of complaining that
| the issue isn't in my house, they finally sent a bucket truck a
| half a mile up the road and the problem was fixed in about 30
| minutes. It worked well for about a year and then started
| happening again. They started giving me the run around again. I
| had appointments scheduled for technicians to come, three times
| in a row they just never showed up. To "apologize" to me they
| said they would provide a credit on my account. The amount? 1
| penny. I took a screenshot and saved it in case anyone thinks I
| am making this up. Luckily, by this time starlink was available
| in my area. I switched to that, turns out it's much cheaper
| anyway and since then have not had any issues. The sooner Comcast
| goes out of business, the better.
|
| Tip to anyone reading this: After I cancelled and closed my
| account, they billed me one last time for double my monthly bill
| ($200). No idea why, probably they thought they'd try to get away
| with it. I had little to no interest in participating in their
| customer support circus again, so I just went online to my bank
| and submitted a dispute of the charge. The bank _instantly_ ruled
| in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I
| have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast
| chargebacks to do that.
|
| I also submitted a complaint to the AG office and my local
| commission but I'm not expecting anything to happen.
| hinkley wrote:
| The cost of disgruntled customers is that they might work for a
| competitor or a company you have to work with, like a bank.
| ebjcoat wrote:
| Of the ~40 or so businesses I do general IT work for in New
| England, the ones with Comcast as the ISP are the least
| reliable. They experience significantly more downtime than any
| other provider.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| I lived on the west coast for 15 years, mostly in California,
| and in my experience Comcast/Xfinity is one of the worst
| companies I have ever encountered as a consumer. Not only is
| the service unreliable, the company tries to slap you with
| charges when you call to report a problem. One day I saw a
| Comcast technician working outside my apartment, and as he was
| leaving, my internet service went down. I called Comcast, they
| sent someone out a few hours later, the internet was
| restored... and then, when I got my monthly bill, there was an
| additional charge for $29 or something, iirc. When I called
| customer service to ask them to remove the charge, they
| transferred my call several times and put me on hold for
| several minutes every time they transferred the call. Finally,
| after a hour on the phone, they agreed to remove the charge.
|
| Since then, I have moved to Austin, where there are two large
| Internet Service Providers competing against each other. I
| mostly use Spectrum; it is not perfect, people here complain
| about it, but it is incomparably better than Comcast.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| They're not a monopoly anymore. Starlink is great, as is 5G to
| the home (I have both) where available.
|
| They're already paying for it, they've built businesses around
| their monopolies. The ads you see on streaming networks telling
| you how bad 5G home internet is is their death rattle.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I found this one weird trick that'll get a Xfinity manager to
| personally come to your residence and leave a card with their
| cell phone number for you to call if you have any problems with
| your service. All it takes is for your city to start a build out
| of a fiber ISP.
|
| I really had no complaints about Xfinity service other than the
| limited outbound bandwidth. But when our city deployed their own
| fiber ISP and our neighborhood was one of the first to get
| deployed, I was anxious to switch. The week they pulled the fiber
| down our street, a manager at Xfinity came down our street super
| concerned with keeping our business.
|
| Prior to the city fiber we had no real other choice (4-6Mbps DSL
| or terrestrial wireless that was struggling). Having real
| alternative pushed the Xfinity price down by at least half, and
| made them start to care. The phone company has started deploying
| fiber in the last year or so as well.
| Frotag wrote:
| Similar story, Cox silently tripled my speeds when a new
| company started rolling out fiber.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >All it takes is for your city to start a build out of a fiber
| ISP.
|
| So, I worked for Cox in the late 90s - early 2000s where in
| many Louisiana cities we had dial up return cable modems. Yea,
| these things sucked as bad as you would expect. The city
| pleaded with Cox to upgrade to a 2 way cable system offering
| incentives and low interest bonds, etc. Anything to get better
| internet. We wouldn't budge.
|
| So, the city started a municipal fiber push. In 24 hours the
| company released 2 million dollars in funds to.... no, not
| upgrade and work on infrastructure. For advertising against
| 'city socialism' and political donations.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I once had the joy of reversing the script on Xfinity tech
| support. I was online in the middle of the night and my cable
| connection went down. I switched over to cellular and noticed a
| bunch of other local people with cable modem IPs on an IRC
| channel frequented by my friends also disconnected at the same
| time.
|
| So I called Xfinity support to report the outage, the tech did
| some digging when I told him a bunch of local people seemed to be
| impacted, he found a report in their systems of an outage
| impacting my area.
|
| I asked him if he had tried rebooting their router.
| jallonclone wrote:
| I have a similar problem with the power company. Every day
| starting around 2200 (excluding Saturdays and US holidays), there
| are irregular voltage fluctuations in the 118-124 voltage range,
| which cause really annoying light flicker and might be damaging
| my appliances (3 water heaters, 2 microwaves, and an air
| conditioner all dead in the last 5 years), some of them new. It
| affects other neighbors and is clearly coming from the grid.
|
| Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since
| they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer
| and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load
| center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was
| desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance
| customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article,
| they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about
| it.
| ultrahax wrote:
| Related, to this day my Frontier connection black holes all my
| traffic a couple of hops inside their network if I do sustained
| line-rate UDP (WireGuard, for example) for more then three or
| four minutes. After some LinkedIn sleuthing I got in touch with
| their local NOC director who tells me it's some piece of gear
| that hangs so bad he can't remote into it and it stays down until
| the watchdog fires. Been that way for two years now.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| This is what happens when super conglomerate monopoly like
| "Comcast NBC Universal" essentially captured the federal anti-
| monopoly regulatory bodies as well as congressional seats in both
| parties.
| thallium205 wrote:
| The author lists Starlink at 100mb/s down but I'm consistently
| getting around 400mb/s these days with the high performance dish
| and a commitment of gigabit speeds next year. He's got options.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| If only we had some organization working in the best interests of
| the common people, for the common good of all. It could enforce
| certain rules and standards, like making ISPs fix problems, and
| making sure everyone has access to high-speed internet. Does
| anything like that exist, I wonder?
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