Internet horror stories: How ISPs screwed over users

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/internet-horror-stories-how-isps-screwed-over-ars-readers/

by tanglesome • 13 years ago

91 75 13 years ago

herge• 13 years ago

The more I think about it, the more I want government to step in and nationalise/regulate internet service, like they did with electricity.

Internet access has become commoditized enough that there isn't much innovation in it's distribution, and it is so necessary for modern businesses that it makes economic sense.

codegeek2• 13 years ago

I could not agree more for this specific case. Really wish Internet was just another utility that we paid for and not worry about the monopoly these ISPs have specially in some remote areas.

humanrebar2• 13 years ago

There is some parallel, but ISPs are not commoditized like electricity utilities are. Once consumer-level data is pretty even across the board and companies are only competing for lock-in and price, those kinds of regulations make much more sense.

In other words, let's wait until use cases like uploading multiple HD video streams are trivial before we freeze the current technical expectations and business models.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

Remote areas? I had remarkably little choice in New York City. I lived in Brooklyn and had Optimum Online. I was happy with it, but then moved to Queens and now I had to switch to RCN, because they were in my building and Optimum wasn't. Moved to Manhattan, and had to get TWC, until FiOS was installed in the building.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

In the UK, we have loads of broadband companies who sell service through BT phonelines. (catch: you have to pay BT for line rental, which at £13/month isn't too bad, and you do get a phone number for that.) This acts very much like the "municipal fiber network" proposed in the article - all your customer service is with who you pay your bill to, and they set your download limits and any throttling (and there are more expensive options[1] that offer larger, well-defined limits and promise not to throttle.)

Fibre connections seem to be either BT or Virgin running their own (separate) infrastructure all over the place, and you can get cable broadband if you actually want cable TV.

Personally I've stuck with ADSL2+ since, in London, that's good enough. When I move out next year, we'll see which hardware can get me the best speeds.

[1] http://idnet.net

cdr• 13 years ago

That was supposed to be how it worked in the US, at least in the late 90s/early 00s - phone (and cable too, I think?) telco network operators were legally obligated to let other ISP companies lease their lines and deliver service to customers. There was no real enforcement though, and network operators just waged guerrilla warfare on independent ISPs - inexplicable "delays" connecting lines for customers that disappeared if the customer got impatient and signed up for the telco instead, service limitations and outages that telco customers on the same lines didn't notice, etc - until most/all of the independent ISPs went bankrupt or gave up.

davidgerard• 13 years ago

Yes. OpenReach - the bit that actually runs the network - is legally part of the private company BT, but, through several reorganisations and a privatisation, is still functionally the GPO of the 1970s: a highly-regulated bit of public social functionality. Except a new phone line now takes three weeks instead of six months.

Spittie• 13 years ago

Sadly this doesn't always work. We have a similar system here in Italy (Telecom Italia own pretty much the whole phone network, and it's forced to rent it to other ISP, at a low price because it's considered a monopoly).

Fine, yes? No. The other ISP just rent less bandwidth than they'd really need, so they can't offer a decent service (during peak hour it's very easy to get less speed than what you'd get with a 56k).

It doesn't help that we don't have a cable network too, so we're stuck with the phone one. This mean low theoretical max speed (20mb down and 1mb up, with adsl2+), and the signal get really bad as soon as you get a bit far from the central.

Now, this is (very slowly) changing, the bigger ISP are starting to get their own infrastructure and some big cities are starting to get cabled in FTTC (no FTTH because "or copper network is good enough" [sic]). I've also the feeling that I won't see FTTC anytime soon, even if I live ~10km from Milan.

There's also to say that there isn't really any interests for high-speed internet. Last I've heard, only 15% of the people reached by a 20/1 connection buy it (preferring the slower 10/1 or 7/480k, which cost respectively 1€/month and 5€/month less).

VolatileVoid• 13 years ago

This is relatively similar to how it works in Israel.

To get internet access you actually need two things: infrastructure and an ISP. Infrastructure is through one of two companies (although it may be more now? I'm not sure): Bezeq (DSL) or HOT (Cable). After that you choose your own ISP.

Typically infrastructure is the more expensive of the two, and the ISP is quite cheap.

It's also illegal to have binding contracts for utilities here so if HOT pisses me off, I can switch to Bezeq. If my ISP pisses me off I can switch to another one within 20 minutes. I think this latter point is actually the most effective in getting what I want from my providers. Customer service here is pretty awful usually (and this is from a person who used to live in NYC and had TWC), but when they know they risk losing you very easily it's easy to get what you want.

I think if you unbundle and do away with contracts you'll get a pretty powerful combination.

salient• 13 years ago

If you want competition, stop letting local governments make "deals" with the ISP's to bring such and such Internet or service to that area. Almost always that ensures the company will get a monopoly in that area.

It's precisely for this reason why I'm against states making deals with ISP's even if it means bringing gigabit fiber to their areas. Will it still be fast enough 10-15 years later? Because you can bet they aren't going to upgrade it anymore after they get their local monopoly. I'm sure 1-10 Mbps seemed super-fast 10 years ago, too, when they made the first deals from which they got their current monopolies.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

In addition to the predictable obsolescence you cite, a problem with making deals with USA telcos is that they seldom stick to the terms of those deals. Even if some stick-in-the-mud with an excess of conscience won't play ball at the local or state level, they can always overrule that with the commissioners they've bought at the next higher level.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/billions-in-cus...

mindslight4• 13 years ago

I'm sure 1-10 Mbps seemed super-fast 10 years ago

It's plenty fast now, too. Good-quality 1080p H.264 video is 3Mbps. 6Mbps is 50GB/day. If this is not enough, you most likely have a software problem.

Not that we shouldn't strive for progress, but most of the complains in these comments are completely different from the rural horror stories of the article - they're taking for granted development that isn't actually there. Signing up for the cable company because it has the highest advertised speeds and then complaining about the implications of a shared medium provided by an unregulated monopoly is myopic entitled whining.

Look into competing DSL options, really. Your new provider may even have warm-blooded people answering the phone.

Jtsummers4• 13 years ago

So we can saturate our internet connections with one video stream. That means it's not fast enough. Presently living alone so this is mostly a nonissue for me, but what about people with 2+ users at home? One wants to watch the latest Doctor Who, the other wants to check their email and browse the web, someone is losing out.

maxsilver• 13 years ago

It's plenty fast now, too. ...If this is not enough, you most likely have a software problem.

And 640k should be enough memory for anybody.

The problem here is that decent internet access (10-30mbps per person) is cheap to deploy, and easy to do, when there are no other problems standing in the way. (For instance, when the cable company doesn't buy off the local government).

Apologizing for phone and cable companies who are raking in record profits doesn't help us in any way.

they're taking for granted development that isn't actually there.

The development is there. Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, and Romania didn't just "magic" their internet in existence. They took cheap easily-obtained widely-available technology and simply deployed it, along with the 30 other countries who all have (on average) faster / better / more reliable internet service than the USA.

http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/

Notice the pricing there too -- USA pays more for internet than many other countries that rank higher than we do. (We pay 4 times more money per mbps than Denmark does, and receive slower service then them for that cash).

http://www.netindex.com/value/allcountries/

Signing up for the cable company because it has the highest advertised speeds and then complaining about the implications of a shared medium provided by an unregulated monopoly is myopic entitled whining.

I think we understand the implications of the shared medium. But it's clear that the medium isn't the issue -- it's the misuse of the technology by the ISPs. DOCIS 3.0 is not the issue, Comcast trying to cut costs by making thousands of homes share the same backhaul on the same lines, is the issue.

And what else should folks do? Cable is the only internet service that qualifies as "high speed" (by the FCC's very very lax definition of 'High speed') in 99% of the United States.

There are zero other options.

Look into competing DSL options, really.

Why bother? So I can switch to one of the dozens of companies who all resell the same 2mb AT&T ADSL line. (A line which, according to our own Federal Communications Commission, is too slow to be called "high speed internet")

http://www.fcc.gov/reports/sixth-broadband-progress-report

Why would you suggest we subsidize the phone companies attempts to kill our access to the internet? At least the cable company offers something.

Your new provider may even have warm-blooded people answering the phone.

They sure do. AT&T has the friendliest phone support team, who will in very kind and gentle terms, explain that since they're too lazy to maintain a single copper pair, I can't even maintain a single Netflix stream. But I should pay them $40/month for it anyway, because it includes "free long distance".

coldcode• 13 years ago

Funny how efficient electric service is now in Texas. There is one outfit that installs and maintains the lines, and dozens of competing service companies that just handle billing (and oddly enough all use the same third party billing software). Compare that with the ISP situation where each town has a cable company and a phone company and that's it. Except where an older phone company had a presence years ago where those lucky folks can also get FIOS as an option. My town, the 50th largest city in the US, has TWC and AT&T and no FIOS. So I have an option of Dumb or Dumber.

The laws in this country to allow monopolies are a joke, but both political parties could care less.

ahlatimer• 13 years ago

Depends on where in Texas you're talking about. In Austin, we have the City of Austin Utilities (though the suburbs do seem to have options). El Paso only had one option when I lived there, too.

lemonsrsour• 13 years ago

We have a lot of competing ISPs here in Lithuania. Just for comparison, I pay <15$ for 100mbps connection and in the 10 years I had maybe one or two outages that were fixed within few hours.

stuff4ben• 13 years ago

Makes me think twice about changing my Internet from Earthlink (provided by TWC) to a faster offering from TWC. It works now and I don't think I've ever had an outage in the almost 10 years I've had it in 2 separate houses. Only problem is it's slow as dirt. They advertise 15/3 but I rarely get over 380Kbps upstream which makes working from home all but impossible for me. I'd love to get 30 or 50Mbps down, but I'm afraid of what might happen if I switch...

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

It's time to make Internet access a public utility, just like water and electricity. In this day and age, Internet access is as much an essential part of life as both of the above.

Remember that the cables that they use were paid for with public tax money. The private companies are selling back to us the infrastructure that we already paid to build.

This is one issue on which neither progressives (who tend to favor government utilities/services) nor libertarians (who tend to favor the free market) are happy, because we have the worst of both worlds: a government-sanctioned, unregulated monopoly, using infrastructure built with public tax dollars, and re-sold to the original payers (the public) at monopolistic prices.

Unfortunately, recent efforts in this direction have completely failed. A North Carolina town dissatisfied with Time Warner banded together to create a municipal ISP, and Time Warner sued, on the basis that they "couldn't compete[0]" with the superior speeds and lower prices that the municipal ISP provided. In the end, Time Warner won[1].

I, like 80% of people in the US, have no choice as to my broadband provider. I don't have a landline. I don't have cable TV. All I need is Internet access, and for that, my only option is paying Time Warner Cable, at whatever price they decide to charge, for whatever service they decide to give me[2].

[0] read: "didn't want to compete" == "it's cheaper for us to sue you than to lower our prices to market rate"

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/the-price-of-muni...

[2] Pro-tip: If you're stuck with TWC as well, don't pay for the higher speed levels. That's just the maximum possible speed, and they don't guarantee you anything close to that, for any portion of your monthly service. If you live in a congested area, you're likely to get the same speed regardless of which tier you purchase, so just pick the cheapest one.

Jtsummers4• 13 years ago

I lived in Wilson before that hooplah. It was fantastic. My job moved back into the Raleigh area so I moved with it (cheaper than a 70mile+commute every day, especially at 15mpg). Ended up on TWC where I got 10Mbit/second at $60/month versus the 20Mbit/second at $40/month (I recall paying less, but that's the currently listed price on the Greenlight site).

aroch• 13 years ago

RE: #2

I can't find the relevant FCC directive at the moment (It may in fact be a state law for me, I can no longer remember), but it's illegal for them to sell '30mbit' service as "30mbit is the highest theoretical speed". Essentially a floating average of your max speed has to be at +/-5% of the sold bandwidth.

revelation• 13 years ago

And then they don't even provide internet access. They go out of their way to not peer with anyone, to their ultimate goal where net neutrality is abolished and they can charge you to access Google and Google to serve you.

It would be half reasonable if they just didn't bother to invest in infrastructure, you know like in public transport, but instead they are actively working to make it worse.

reginaldjcooper• 13 years ago

Remember that the cables that they use were paid for with public tax money. The private companies are selling back to us the infrastructure that we already paid to build.

Actually unless I was misinformed, they are selling back the unimproved infrastructure that we paid them to improve. The whole situation makes me so furious and there's nothing I can do. Mesh networks, I guess. I need to make some friends along a line from here to a backbone.

caiob• 13 years ago

Lately, I don't mind connection speeds as much as I care about absurd data caps. It's almost 2014, for god sake. Are we still having to fight for our data usage?

drcube2• 13 years ago

Because anyone who uses more than 5GB a month is a pirate, don't you know?

hfsktr• 13 years ago

It's ridiculous considering the variety of activities that require internet. According to the usage chart for the last few months when I log into TWC our house uses more than 5GB a day (we have 3 adults and a kid in the house).

ieatdots• 13 years ago

Used to more or less be the case, until Netflix. =)

Joeri• 13 years ago

My cable provider finally got rid of data caps, only to reinstate them when netflix started making waves about coming to my country. I suspect the only reason data caps exist at all at this point is to avoid online vod services from completely replacing traditional cable tv.

adriancooney• 13 years ago

I've had a similiar horror story with Eircom, one of Ireland's main providers. We were paying for 3mb/s at €40/month but only receiving around 0.4mb/s. I gave customer service a ring and they said they could downgrade the line to 1mb/s which would improve the actual signal but we'd still have to pay for the 3mb/s. I really wish it was nationalized like electricity but I don't think our government is technically competent yet.

drcube2• 13 years ago

Of course, not everyone's home Internet is terrible.

I dispute this. Is Google Fiber all right? Do you Silicon Valley folks get decent service? Because out here in the real world, ISPs are uniformly horrible. I haven't met or talked to anyone on the entire Internet who is satisfied, or simply not constantly enraged, by their ISP. It seems every single one is corrupt and incompetent at the same time.

Tyr42• 13 years ago

I don't hate my ISP. But I've got no cap, and good speeds.

alongenemylines• 13 years ago

Ditto. My only complaint is the price. I pay for 10 mbit service from TWC, and regularly have speeds of 18 mbit. Also, my external ip hasn't changed since I installed my modem, and I don't pay for a static IP.

mintplant• 13 years ago

Comcast in San Jose provides decent speeds, but the connection can be spotty and drops out at times. Also, despite claims to the contrary, torrent traffic appears to be very heavily throttled. Whenever I try downloading a Linux ISO via torrent, download rates will often start out high, then sharply drop to somewhere under 100 kbps.

On a related note, for whatever reason, no traffic on ports 6660-6669 (IRC) can get through, but I haven't seen this problem reported anywhere else. Combing through the settings on the router they provide, there doesn't seem to be anything blocking it on my end.

dankoss• 13 years ago

I've had no trouble with Comcast in my area in service or support. My problem with them is that they're colluding with AT&T to keep internet prices high and upsell everyone onto bundled plans, when all I need is internet (not home phone and TV service). Thus they charge $20/mo for 3Mbps, $50 for 6Mbps and $65 for 25Mbps unbundled internet, and AT&T charges roughly the same.

bluedino• 13 years ago

> Because out here in the real world, ISPs are uniformly horrible.

Not really. Sure, there are a lot of bad ISP's and places to live with few options, but there's a lot of great internet service out there. Go on any message board and view the threads "Post your speedtest results", and for everyone who's stuck with some shit DSL provider with 1mb up and .25 mb down (my current situation) there's someone with 45.99/month 30mb up 3mb down cable internet or $89.99 FIOS.

Sure, it's not as fantastic as some of the connections you see from people in Europe or Asia with 100mb+ for $39.99, but you have to remember everyone doesn't have that mystical connection who lives outside the USA. There's plenty of bad internet to be had as well.

chroem• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that people go there to brag about their unusually high connection speeds.

sjm-lbm• 13 years ago

There's a sizable portion of the country that has Verizon Fios - in a random suburb of Dallas, I can get 75/35 for ~$80 with no data caps. It's not amazing, but it's not horrid.

harshreality• 13 years ago

What's so frustrating is that only some sections of some large metro areas (like Los Angeles and Dallas) can get it. Looking at the FIOS map from broadbandreports[1], there's no FIOS availability within the 635 ring east of I-35, which is most (all?) of Dallas proper.

The main places with solid FIOS coverage are in the northeast: most major metro areas in the VA Beach-DC-NYC-Boston corridor. And Pittsburgh. And Ft. Wayne, IN. Because Ft. Wayne clearly needs FTTP more than Indianapolis.

Most other municipalities in the rest of the country are either locked into exclusivity contracts with other providers, or can't be bothered to give their residents real choice of good providers, or Verizon doesn't want the initial outlay for infrastructure costs for more deployment at this time, or some combination.

[1] https://secure.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

nathanb2• 13 years ago

I am not constantly enraged at TWC. They charge way too much for what I get, but it works consistently at the advertised speed. The installer added a coaxial port for me in the room I wanted without complaining or charging extra, and my external IP has been static for three years now. I have never seen evidence of a cap (not that I am a heavy bandwidth user).

I still feel like I am charged way too much for what I get, and I'm scared to mess with anything (for example, to buy my own modem to avoid the ridiculous modem rental fee they tacked on) because I don't want stuff to stop working (or to have to deal with their tech support line). I am in no way happy with them. But I am not enraged.

(When I lived in Blacksburg, VA there were three options for broadband -- DSL, cable, and a university-affiliated provider -- which were all in heavy competition to be the most horrible. I was actively enraged pretty much constantly over the miserable state of affairs. So I know that feel.)

Locke1689• 13 years ago

I love my ISP, CondoInternet. $60, 100M symmetric. Upgrade to 1000 available. Free static IP, full IPv6 support.

steve-howard• 13 years ago

Same. The only downside is that the buildings they provide service to are horrendously expensive.

aklemm• 13 years ago

I had that for free in my building in Seattle. The best days of my life! Now I'm on the East coast and I doubt I'll ever have a great ISP again.

wiredfool• 13 years ago

I like my ISP. My internet's expensive and not terribly fast (18/2), but it's reliable. (more so than the power co. the phone co buried their lines, the power people didn't.)

I'm in a rural area, and as far as I know, there are 2 options, Comcast and the local phone co. I'm with the local company. I've had to call customer service a few times, and the phone is answered at an office 5 miles from here. It's one (not difficult to arrange) transfer to someone who knows what I'm talking about when I go on about routers with the default password and a privilege escalation bug. They're the only telecom that has ever impressed me with their customer service.

nucleardog• 13 years ago

Our primary ISP is crown-owned (it's basically a public utility, just like our power, water, gas, etc). They also provide phone service and cellular service.

Their prices are not the best in the world, but they're reasonable and the best around here. While every other ISP is trying to find ways to get people to use less data to avoid infrastructure upgrades, they're rolling out FTTH. $160/mo get's you 200/60.

Everywhere I've ever lived and every connection I've ever tested as been the speed sold +/-3%. There are no monthly caps (not even soft caps). When the CRTC allowed charging for bandwidth overages, they came out and simply said "Our mandate is not to make money, it is to provide a service to the public. We will not charge for overages as it does not further our mandate."

We have surprisingly close to full coverage of the province even though there are a lot of rural locations.

On the cellular side of things, it's thanks to them our province gets better deals from all of the carriers (even national ones). Our crown corp had been offering deals that were worlds better than every other carrier, forcing the others to try and compete.

At the end of the year, they still generally drop money back in the province's coffers.

Guess what? I'm pretty much satisfied (a little sad my neighbourhood is so far down the list for the FTTH rollout is all) and not constantly enraged.

We have this strange hybrid between market competition and a public utility. I don't know if going fully to a utility would be a benefit for us - the way it's structured now there are still incentives/requirements for the utility to remain competitive and keep prices low. I hesitate to see how this would be bastardized should those requirements go away.

dmunoz• 13 years ago

I'm only guessing here based on what you said and what little knowledge I have, but you're talking about SaskTel in Saskatchewan, right? Others who find it interesting might want to look into them.

From what I have heard about SaskTel's cellular service, I'm jealous that more provinces haven't adopted the model. Of course, crown corporations are not always so rosy; a few provinces over, we have the mess that is BC Ferries.

crymer11• 13 years ago

I love the service I get from my ISP (EPB) - 1 Gb/s symmetrical fiber connection for ~$70/month with customer service that's been very pleasant and helpful every time I've dealt with them. FWIW, EPB is owned by the city of Chattanooga, so they aren't your typical ISP. My only complaint is that you have to be a business customer to be assigned a static IP address (which is reasonable), but they've mentioned they'll be re-evaluating that policy once they're switched over to IPv6 (and there's the fact that my address hasn't changed since switching to them over 3 years ago).

km3k• 13 years ago

I'm actually happy with my Verizon FIOS in Western New York. That said, I am in a grandfathered special plan where I get 25Mb up & down for $45 a month. I have no idea how long that will last.

I haven't had many problems with their service except that once or twice a year the DHCP lease on their server gets stuck where it won't give me an IP and I need to call them to break the DHCP lease so I can get an IP address. The last couple times I broke the DHCP lease via their Twitter support ( https://twitter.com/VerizonSupport ) and it was faster than calling on the phone. I also use OpenDNS so I don't know if their DNS servers are bad.

I use OpenDNS because I used to have Time Warner Cable and their DNS servers went down several times per week.

carlospaulino2• 13 years ago

It's true that TWC and Comcast are the worst of all. But I have to disagree, not all providers suck.

In my current town (Clifton, NJ) we can get Verizon FIOS and Optimum. Both providers are fighting fiercely for customers.

I used FIOS for a year and it was great, no caps,full speeds and good support. I later switched to Optimum and it is fantastic, I've never been so happy with a service provider, they upgraded most users from 50mbit to 100mbit for free, and they are actually giving me a true 100mbit connection, not to mention an outstanding customer support.

kvinnako• 13 years ago

that's because you have competition. Most of the places have no chioce. They are either stuck with optimum or verizon dsl. So you are in a minority. Also, clifton, nj is a rich neighborhood, thats why probably you have both fios and optimum.

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

Might be an American thing. In Europe things aren't so bad.

I live in Poland and I have a pretty good connection (think ~60MB for $15 a month), and for years I never really had any problems with my ISP. That is not to say they aren't any crap providers out there. The rule of thumb is: landline and mobile phone company give crappy, capped, unreliable Internet for riddiculous prices; cable TV companies give good, high-speed, high-reliability connection very cheaply.

Groxx• 13 years ago

Moving into the SV bay area, my internet cost doubled, speed cut in half, and call-center service got significantly worse. It's not the worst internet in America, but it's noticeably below the average that I've seen, and costs more.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Is there some law that keeps power and gas companies[1] from doing internet?

1) they have right of way to the home

forkrulassail• 13 years ago

I've been kicked from 7 South African ISPs as a top 2% or 'abuse' user, after paying for uncapped access. Things seriously need to change this side.

nathanb2• 13 years ago

I visited SA a few months ago, with an eye toward possibly moving there and working remotely (I'm a software developer for a large software engineering corporation that's relatively friendly toward remote workers).

My opinion was that it would be very difficult to be a remote software worker in SA because the network infrastructure was so poor. Everyone I talked to just used USB cellular modems to get online, and the load would actually cause the cell tower near my friend's flat to crash sometimes at peak hours. The Internet was entirely unusable for good portions of the day.

Meanwhile, if you're willing to pay a premium for installation and use of a wired connection, you wind up dealing with the sort of thing you faced or just flat out apathy toward whether or not the service should actually work consistently.

In your own experience, is this an accurate assessment?

mnw21cam• 13 years ago

Largely I'm happy with my ISP. Except that somewhere in their core network they have a broken link, which means that 0.01% of the internet is inaccessible to me, as of a couple of weeks ago when they "upgraded" my connection. Unfortunately that 0.01% includes my friend's computer which runs my backup email servers. Tried explaining this on the phone to the ISP. The script the phone-jockey had basically took me through rebooting the router, trying a couple of different browsers, and then saying that they were pleased to have solved the problem.

crum• 13 years ago

Has anyone heard of: "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age"

freeasinfree• 13 years ago

There are usually alternatives, but they're sometimes hard to find. MonkeyBrains in SF is top-notch. http://www.wispa.org/find-a-wisp

Aloha• 13 years ago

I worked for a major ISP - Two of them, one being the largest suppliers of DSL nationwide and the other, their largest reseller.

There are some horror stories out there - in truth, the majority of customers get what they pay for monthly without the plethora of stupids presented here.

On the other hand, when I set up service with Comcast, my bill had 4-5 mystery charges monthly for 4 months, no one could explain what they were, and they got credited. But still, it was an hour of my time each time it happened.

jamestnz• 13 years ago

Interesting article for me, being that I have no experience with the ISP industry in America at all.

"The best solution, I think, is to lay fiber in all the municipalities and have consumers choose their ISP, with service delivered on the municipal fiber lines..."

This is exactly what has been happening where I live - Christchurch, New Zealand. A number of years ago, a city-owned LLC called Christchurch City Networks Limited (now known as Enable Networks[1]) began rolling out an extensive fibre network in the downtown/city-centre area. Initially, for about $700 (NZD) per month, you could lease a dark pair between your premises and your ISP of choice (or even directly between two arbitrary premises, plugging directly into your own equipment at each end, with no ISP involved).

You'd then negotiate arbitrary speed/bandwidth/caps with your chosen ISP. We were paying something like $3000 per month for a 1000 mbit/sec internet connection with (IIRC) a 2TB cap. This was probably 8 years ago or something, it doesn't cost anything like this now.

Latterly, they've been rolling out a GPON-based (passive) fibre network. If you are connected to this part of the network, there are highly standardised plans available from multiple ISPs. You can choose one of two speeds: 30 mbit/sec symmetric, or 100 mbit/sec symmetric. Different ISPs have different usage plans available. Any public (government-funded) school can sign up for a 30 mbit/sec plan, with unlimited traffic, for something like $200/month.

Amongst home users, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 are both still popular choices (and our pricing there seems similar enough to the US, with stupidly low caps and high prices), but fibre continues to gain traction.

[1] http://www.enable.net.nz

sarah2079• 13 years ago

Talking with Comcast on the phone can seem like talking to someone from another planet. When I moved last year and needed to move my service with me, I was instructed to just bring the Comcast box to the new place myself, and then call a specific number when I had connected it to turn service on. Great! I thought, that sounds easy.

Well it turns out the people answering at that number (the number they gave me, remember) were completely unfamiliar with the concept of moving. "You want to do what?" they asked incredulously, as if I was the first person they had ever encountered who had moved from one residence to another.

"I have moved. My service has already been disconnected at the old address, and I would like to activate it at my new address" I repeated, thinking they had just misheard me.

"Have you tried unplugging it and then plugging it back in?" they offered helpfully.

After an hour on the phone and many, many transfers I was finally able to talk to someone who could handle this bizarre and complicated request. I hate to think how much time it will cost me if I ever have a real problem.

simoncion• 13 years ago

I hate to think how much time it will cost me if I ever have a real problem.

If you're a person with clue, get friendly with the folks at the local Comcast office, or one of the technicians. If you're technically inclined and can demonstrate that you're wise enough to only call them about issues with their network, you'll probably be able to get the support number for the local office.

TrainedMonkey• 13 years ago

I am surprised AOL is not mentioned. I remember story going around how subscription made by a person could not be cancelled even though that person passed away.

Internet horror stories: How ISPs screwed over users

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