A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

https://sacbear.com/xfinity-wont-fix-internet/

by vedmed • 8 months ago

623 283 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

"only gigabit provider". Like those grow on trees. Lots of people would love to have a fraction of that speed.

fsckboy• 8 months ago

everybody has a fraction of that speed

AngryData• 8 months ago

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.

ashirviskas• 8 months ago

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

yxhuvud• 8 months ago

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.

sidewndr462• 8 months ago

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.

nativeit3• 8 months ago

I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

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 :(

nativeit3• 8 months ago

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.

sidewndr462• 8 months ago

The poor state of the infrastructure is usually a result of the monopoly. Maintenance is just a cost. It's not going to bring you any new customers or any new revenue.

I've been through the same thing the post author has. By some random chance I once called tech support and got someone on the phone who was authorized to investigate it and do something about it. Service improved a little bit after that.

toast04• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

nativeit3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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 .

willis936• 8 months ago

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".

jliptzin3• 8 months ago

It's not more expensive, I am paying $40 / month for 100 Mbit, which is fine for me.

bigbuppo• 8 months ago

Call your public service commission. Call your municipality. The fun thing about cable companies is that unlike telcos, their monopolies are almost always bounded by a contract.

bpbp-mango• 8 months ago

I'd start my own ISP for the area

cube00• 8 months ago

It's possible if you have the startup cash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906

altairprime6• 8 months ago

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.

HumanOstrich8• 8 months ago

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.

altairprime6• 8 months ago

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.

mh-3• 8 months ago

I think that's probably why they downgraded his speed from 1200 to 700, in an attempt to avoid using the more sensitive channels.

altairprime6• 8 months ago

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?

razingeden6• 8 months ago

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.

altairprime6• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

joecool10292• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

razingeden6• 8 months ago

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.

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. :>

martinald3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

The author explains in the article they’re looking for gigabit service and Comcast is the only player in the area.

HumanOstrich8• 8 months ago

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.

martinald3• 8 months ago

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).

tfvlrue2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

This reminds me exactly of "The Art of Turboing"[1]

[1] https://www.macwhiz.com/blog/art-of-turboing/

masfuerte• 8 months ago

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.

op00to5• 8 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 8 months ago

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.

ericrallen• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

delfinom• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_dunning2• 8 months ago

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.

tfvlrue2• 8 months ago

how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable

I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible, I connected the oscilloscope to see what the signals looked like. And, because, why not. I had driven 2+ hours to get there, might as well try everything! I didn't expect it to actually be able to decode the signals. I was surprised to find a correlation between the modem losing sync and a visually-distinct pattern appearing on the scope though.

netruk44• 8 months ago

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.

op00to5• 8 months ago

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.

ghjnut• 8 months ago

I had issues too that they sent a tech support out for while warning me "If they find it's your fault, you will be assessed a charge". The tech came out, climbed my local pole and then went down the street and climbed another one. He said it was a busted port and he moved me to a new one, and put in a service request to upgrade as it was out of ports.

CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".

After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.

ct0• 8 months ago

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.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 8 months ago

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).

Nextgrid11• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

hamdingers2• 8 months ago

This is a fantasy. They will disconnect your service and send your unpaid bills to collections. They hold all the cards.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 8 months ago

I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to care less.

Maybe they were doing this?

https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8

joecool10292• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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-3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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?"

vedmed12• 8 months ago

My brother ran the article through gemini and left that comment

matt123456789• 8 months ago

I think it was someone trying to help and being cheeky about it.

NamlchakKhandro• 8 months ago

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

Thorrez• 8 months ago

You can put whatever name you want there when you post a comment. You don't need to have a registered account.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 8 months ago

Did the neighbor get in trouble or was this a mom-stealing-baby-food-and-diapers kind of witnessing?

komali2• 8 months ago

Or was it "the neighbor" in the same way that "my friend" has a weed hookup?

3eb7988a1663• 8 months ago

Strongly doubt anyone fessed up to the destruction. "Came out this morning and some hooligans must have done it in the night"

esseph• 8 months ago

That's a felony in the US by the way, and most will prosecute if they have enough evidence of who it was.

mschuster912• 8 months ago

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.

razingeden6• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

So much for the platitude that violence never solves anything.

devwastaken• 8 months ago

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.

HumanOstrich8• 8 months ago

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.

radlad• 8 months ago

I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I had a similar issue with WOW.

gxs• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

They fear juries (jurors, really).

layla5alive• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

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.

HumanOstrich8• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

hurricanepootis3• 8 months ago

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_dunning2• 8 months ago

If you can't document your attempts to document and resolve the issue in your FCC complaint it will have far less credibility.

hurricanepootis3• 8 months ago

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.

rft• 8 months ago

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

hurricanepootis3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

I'm with you. They should all be prosecuted the hell out of

djhedges• 8 months ago

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.

DeathArrow2• 8 months ago

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

DeathArrow2• 8 months ago

Apparently the people downvoting haven't watched The IT Crowd TV series. It was a joke.

yaur• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Sounds to me like they already had at least three on-site visits by technicians.

rmoriz2• 8 months ago

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.

7bit2• 8 months ago

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.

rmoriz2• 8 months ago

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.

mschuster912• 8 months ago

I don't call Vodafone Würgdafone for no reason lol.

When on a business contract it's ok, but private contracts? Oh hell have they been plagued with scandals.

bob1029• 8 months ago

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.

runjake3• 8 months ago

What caveats? It sounds like Starlink would be a perfect backup and likely save you a lot of money.

hylaride• 8 months ago

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.

ipkstef• 8 months ago

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

vedmed12• 8 months ago

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.

cyanydeez3• 8 months ago

Start by never voting for deregulation

jlubawy• 8 months ago

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.

bdavbdav2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.

fucalost• 8 months ago

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.

Aachen2• 8 months ago

What's an or problem or tech? A web search gives predictably nothing

bdavbdav2• 8 months ago

Openreach. The infrastructure provider

proactivesvcs• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Name and shame!!! Charter, Cox, Comcast... all are ridiculously user-hostile.

econ2• 8 months ago

Everyone downstream of whatever is broken on their infrastructure probably has it too.

Probably?

vedmed12• 8 months ago

Being careful not to make claims I can't prove.

sp0ck• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

immibis3• 8 months ago

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.

Nextgrid11• 8 months ago

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").

immibis3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Sue them.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

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.

cyanydeez3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

icedchai2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood.

Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.

Nextgrid11• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

xp842• 8 months ago

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.

bavell2• 8 months ago

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).

PaulHoule4• 8 months ago

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.

Nextgrid11• 8 months ago

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.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

ranger_danger• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

zeruch• 8 months ago

"I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well"

Lobbying by big ISPs.

LeonM• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Another example why monopolies are bad.

reactordev• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Starlink is available planet wide.

joelthelion• 8 months ago

(not from the US) If xfinity sucks so much, could you try switching to a different provider?

manifoldgeo• 8 months ago

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...

Sunstruck• 8 months ago

They have an effective monopoly in a large portion of the country or they are still better than the handful of alternatives.

kro• 8 months ago

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.

supportengineer3• 8 months ago

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.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

That's exactly what I did.

neilv2• 8 months ago

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.

Nextgrid11• 8 months ago

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.

neilv2• 8 months ago

How did you read that? This is an ongoing situation.

wdr1• 8 months ago

One nice thing about Starlink is it gives an alternative to what used to be monopoly ISPs.

tlb• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

PaulHoule4• 8 months ago

My ISP (Frontier) struggles enough with the basics that the last thing I want to do is bring up IPv6.

tibbydudeza• 8 months ago

I am in Africa - getting 100Mbps/100Mbps symmetric fiber to my home. This is frankly terrible for the biggest economy in the world.

anonym29• 8 months ago

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...

jliptzin3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

xnx• 8 months ago

The government wasted its time harassing Google when it should've been persecuting Comcast.

zymhan• 8 months ago

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 did the same thing, except I disputed a collections record on my Credit Report from either AT&T or Comcast. They also ruled in my favor quickly, and I was quite surprised that it wasn't a more difficult process.

mattmaroon• 8 months ago

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.

linsomniac3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Similar story, Cox silently tripled my speeds when a new company started rolling out fiber.

pixl97• 8 months ago

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.

linsomniac3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

hydrox24• 8 months ago

I wonder if what you're experiencing is something called "ripple control" (in Australia).

Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power.

Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.

ultrahax• 8 months ago

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_• 8 months ago

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.

thallium2052• 8 months ago

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.

vedmed12• 8 months ago

Starlink would have be double natted and I couldn't run my server cluster nor my vpn. And it would have high latency.

venturecruelty• 8 months ago

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?

evilmonkey19• 8 months ago

Im from Spain and Im surprised. Do you still use copper? Here everything is fiber. Cheaper, stable, good and the cabinets are (most of the times) secured. Im not saying we are better because we have many issues (no ipv6 for instance) but It surprises me how few isp options you have in US. Doesnt the government force ISPs to being you good internet?

bastard_op• 8 months ago

This is literally every/any ISP that maintains last-mile infrastructure or anything in between. Cable MSO's are (still it seems) the worst, and having worked for various of them in a network engineering capacity, including @home networks the pioneer of cable modems and service, I've seen it for 25+ years after now first or second hand from others that still do. Eventually it's cheaper to pay a call center agent to take their calls and abuse than fix the actual issue in the ground, which is simply business mantra for the 21st century for anything.

valiant55• 8 months ago

I have pretty good success with a regional provider. I have the option of a national (Verizon) provider, but since switching to fiber on the regional I've had a ~two disconnects, a few minutes of down time in two years. Fiber just seems more reliable.

pjsg• 8 months ago

I had a problem with Comcast that was that native IPv6 traffic was slower than IPv6 over my Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel. Support was no use (no surprise). But I happened to meet someone who worked in Comcast's backbone network. He figured it out and I got 10ms knocked of my native IPv6 ping times. (See https://n1dq.blogspot.com/2015/03/ipv6-comparing-hurricane-e... for the story).

The moral of the story is to find someone who works at Comcast who has Engineer in their job title and reach out directly. Linkedin is your friend here.

dramm• 8 months ago

Had very similar dropouts with Comcast. Fired them years ago. Can't be happier than with the 10G Sonic Fiber. Yes we are lucky.

everdev3• 8 months ago

Oh, this is the "innovation" our politicians and talk show hosts were talking about when they wanted regulation and government to get out of the way.

everdev3• 8 months ago

The sick part is they could afford to fix it 5 times over and still be insanely wealthy, but Comcast doesn't care about quality service, it's just a front company to funnel power and money to a small group of people. They're effectively a circle of hell now.

dmitrygr• 8 months ago

Knew it would be comcast from the headline. I celebrate my liberation from comcast with a glass of champagne yearly on the date I was finally able to tell them to pound sand.

PeterStuer• 8 months ago

Our cable DOCSIS isp in our neighbourhood was down for a whole week. Each day the calls and a tech visit on prem were assuring us "this is a top tier priority outage, we have crews on it 24/7", yet in the neighbourhood, not a technician in sight.

Finally 7 days in a crew showed up in the street measuring each street cabinet. They were able to pinpoint the fault to a house 2 blocks down, where they told us a partial cable cut apparently had signal from their powerline flooding the coax signal. Once they decoupled that premise, signal in the area went back to normal.

We were lucky in that we had a DOCSIS 3.1 that tries to downregulate modulations when cable noise is present, so instead of going to 0 internet for a week like the older DOCSIS installs, our usual 500/30 Mbps still managed 0.1 - 3 Mbps up, so things like mail could still eventually get through.

Now looking into Starlink as a backup, as until they run fiber here, there is little alternative (besides vdsl, which is its own nightmare)

porridgeraisin• 8 months ago

Nice thing in India is that all the major providers grey-legally put optical fiber everywhere, so you get FTTH or fiber to the street no matter what. In cities where the development authority is competent, it's slower as they actually have to get approvals and stuff. And in some places they use the 26Ghz band (technically part of 5G) for "air fiber" which is basically a wireless link from the roof of an apartment to a nearby line-of-sight base station. It gives good bandwidth as there is no interference with usual mobile data as that band never ended up working in practice without clean LOS.

ovo101• 8 months ago

The real problem isn’t just one ISP refusing to fix upstream infrastructure—it’s the structural monopoly that lets them get away with it. When customers have no alternatives, neglect becomes a rational business decision: why spend money on upgrades if churn is impossible? This is exactly why municipal broadband and community ISPs matter. They don’t just compete on price, they compete on accountability. Until regulators or local governments break the monopoly, we’ll keep seeing stories where “upstream” issues linger for years because the provider has no incentive to care.

chilimeatOG2• 8 months ago

I have spectrum at my home and literally the same darn problem. Same response from them too. So lame.

chilimeatOG2• 8 months ago

I have spectrum at my home. Same issue. Same response. And I’ve had it at three different locations with a few different hardware configs. Good lord they suck.

jlivingood• 8 months ago

For folks following this here - node and neighborhood look clean. The issue appears to be a failing cable modem (MB8611 - they seem to suffer frequent disconnects when they fail). We have suggested the customer replace the modem ASAP and we will re-run all the DOCSIS diagnostics. Suitable alternative COAM modems are listed at https://old.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/1kg99v3/buying_you...

- Jason (I work at Comcast)

theLegionWithin• 8 months ago

Must be a California issue, never had any issues with Comcast except during the pandemic when everyone was working from home & their network couldn't keep up.

In 15 years, that was my only complaint

A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

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