Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

We have the same problem with Verizon in my Pennsylvania town. The copper wire is in such bad shape that it barely works for voice. We tried to use DSL, but our connection dropped whenever it rained. A technician told us it might be months before they could get a truck out. Customer service told us there was nothing wrong with our service. So we swallowed our pride and went back to Comcast, which chortled and said "we knew you'd come crawling back" while twirling its moustache.

View on HN

Which town are you in? As it happens I own houses in both rural Northeast PA and South Jersey.

My Jersey house must be one of the lucky ones, because I've had FIOS there since about 2009. I can see why the towns are upset, they were promised fiber and now Verizon is bullshitting them with broadband cellular.

As for my PA house. I had asked a tech a few years ago when FIOS would be available here, and his response was "never". I didn't take him at his word, but I'm still getting weekly mailings from Verizon for their 'high speed DSL'.

State College -- we were never promised fiber, but the copper infrastructure is being allowed to rot nonetheless. For another PA data point, my in-laws have a house in Sullivan County where they have passable DSL with Frontier. Verizon is not available there at all.

Agreed - State College internet is dismally slow and unreliable for a town of ~60,000 college students, grads, and employees.

Curious UK resident

Does the College itself get a government/academic feed or do academic institutions have to rely on local commercial providers?

UK has janet and UKERNA.

https://www.jisc.ac.uk/network

http://icannwiki.com/UKERNA

To overcome the limitations of our domestic ADSL (6 km from exchange over solid aluminium wire voice circuit) I sometimes run queries over an RDP session to my College PC.

Somewhere in the middle, I believe. Penn State is big enough that it's basically its own ISP. They're not buying retail internet service from Comcast, but they do pay for bandwidth. Penn State is also an Internet2 node, but that's not what carries most of their traffic.

I remember going to a few meeting back in 08/09 around Tussey Mountain about a company attempting to bring fiber to State College. I guess that never panned out.

Fun hearsay, it was said that for a period in 98/99, West Halls dorm was one of the largest usage of broadband in the country.

It would have to be there or my own alma mater, UIUC. I lived in the dorms there during same era. It was the golden age of WinAmp.

My understanding is that Verizon decided about five years ago not to commit to any new FIOS buildout. All they've been doing since then is finishing what they already committed to. So the tech was probably right.

Ah, but it's not fiber we're talking about, but copper. As far as I can tell, they're years behind on preventative maintenance and unwilling to repair their infrastructure unless there's an outage and they are legally compelled to do so.

Edit: I see you were responding to the immediate parent, not me. Oops.

I have fiber at my NJ House but at my office, which is less than 1.5 miles away, I can't and won't get fiber since Verizon stopped building out the area. And according to the techs it is never going to happen now. Which is disappointing since when I moved in 5 years ago I was told that we were on the map to get fiber at the office (and the house already had it). Fiber is right across the street from the office they just don't want to bring it into the complex (which has about 100 offices).

Start your own ISP with those 100 clients and just finish the build out yourself.

In Washington State, Verizon sold their land-line business to a company called Frontier. The first thing Frontier did, before the ink even dried on the check, was announce that FIOS roll-outs were cancelled forever.

I also had to swallow my pride and go over to Comcast.

When Frontier asked me why I was cancelling my account, I said: "because you haven't upgraded my DSL speed since 1997, and now you've told me you never will." That operator didn't even bother trying to get me to stay after I gave that reason.

Back in the early 00's AT&T came out 20+ times to fix my DSL issues. At one point, the tech said they wouldn't come out anymore and I had to either live with it or switch to Comcast. I did the latter.

Interestingly, one of the early techs put a TDR on the line and found I needed a new drop cable (the cable from the pole to the house). He put the order in. A few hours later a line guy shows up and says "yeah, we're not going to do that." Basically, he said it would cost them $2,000 to put in a new drop cable and he didn't have the authority for that. The next tech that came out basically told me between a wink and a nod that I should have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was "accidentally" severed. I was too chicken to do it. I switched to Comcast and got 10x the speed, for about 2x the price.

I'd love to see more towns turning to solutions like these: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-...

The internet providers are just as bad as the railroads. The have too much power to control which towns and cities thrive in the modern world.

We have a very similar problem with Windstream. Their service sucks and it barely reaches the poor speeds that I'm supposed to get. I'm supposed to get 6mbps down and 768kbps up but I usually get more like 1-3mbps down and 200-400kbps up. I have called to complain more times than I can count and basically get a big old middle finger. Wish a service that didn't suck would come in the area but, aside from satellite or a dedicated line of some sort, windstream is the only one available out here.

we knew you'd come crawling back

In a way you've got to hand it to them. Everyone hates them, and yet they remain one of the most viable players, nationwide.

My DSL and landline would become weak every time it rained. Once I switched to FiOS that disappeared.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com