Comment by small_mind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by small_mind | Hacker News Reader

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Mmmm, but sometimes I've contemplated the hypothetical worst case scenarios for having to support a copper/fiber plant deployment, and what that might actually look like, once you get out into the residential field.

I'm not saying I'm casting a sympathetic eye toward conglomerate post-monopoly abominations like Verizon & AT&T. Far from it.

What I am saying is that as nerds, we really only want to think it looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPNK7bc2qvM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZOZV7ugBas

But actually, it's more often closer to waiting tables for no tips, in homes consumed by pet smells, infested by perverts, losers and arm chair quarterbacks, pissed off that they've elected to pay for systems that can still suffer outages, just like any vaguely fault-tolerant network. Sometimes, as a subscriber of such systems, the faults hit you.

That's kind of what this article is drawing your eye toward. You wonder:

  "How the fuck can a business seemingly employ 
   only monsters, operate policies concocted from
   purest evil, offer zero options, get propped up
   as a monopoly by the worst parts of government
   funding and compliance, and still turn a profit
   where so many other business would instantly 
   implode and vaporize?"

Part of the answer is that like airlines, they offer essential services to the general public, such that modern civilization may function, and enjoy utilities nearly as valuable as hot water, and they know it.

But, the other part is that in order to interface with the gears of a transmission, contact must transmit the forces of the drive train, and that part that makes contact with the customers is that customer service interface, and like the face of an interleaving set of gears, it must be a reflection of ourselves, on some level.

The customer service, in other words, is as abominable as the common customer.

Disclaimer: I've had friends that work in cable service call centers, who have suffered through high call volume outages, and the calls they would tell me about were ever bit as psychotic and soul crushing as some of the anecdotes from the author of this article.

I think this is true up to a point, but only up to a point. After all, there are lots of mass market essential services that work much, much, better than cable (or the airlines), and as a result aren't as universally hated.

In most US cities the power only goes out when lightning hits something or there's a freak heat wave and everyone turns their A/C on at once (or when there are genuine shortages, like in the old CA rolling brownouts). When the power does go out, the power company typically doesn't lie to you. The same was largely true of landline telephone services back in the day, and, in all honesty, is remarkably true of modern cellphone services (although there's a ton of crookedness about price, for the most part they seem to actually supply services they say they do).

In a way, it's actually egalitarian: for the most part cellphone companies, water utilities, etc., when they do abuse their customers, limit their abuses to money stuff and hence pretty much only abuse the poor. (This is less true about airlines but not completely untrue, witness first class and high frequent flier statuses). It's refreshingly fair that with cable companies in this country you can't get decent service at any price; hedge fund managers and janitors have basically the same terrible experience.

Maybe that's part of why there's so much anger at the cable companies, actually, because so many people who they mistreat aren't used to being mistreated by everyone else. And why so many of the customers are badly behaved.

Oh yes, definitely. But, you have to account for a crucial differences with physical medium transmission networks, where transmission fidelity counts.

The physical medium (the wire) must remain contiguous/unabraided and suffer minimal crosstalk interference.

This means the perfection of signal quality is being directly inspected by the customer, and that the product is non-portable, highly technical, and in personal, private spaces within the home.

Water and power are non-portable, but signal is purely graded by volume sufficiency being present or absent. So, to test, it’s either on or off, and once it’s on, job’s done. Very little haggle or complaint. Water quality is typically promised to be solved prior to the last mile, and last mile concerns are on the subscriber. Not quite so with digital service.

With cellular/wireless service, the last mile appliance is defacto portable. It’s a plain fact that handsets are pocket sized and semi-disposable/planned for obsolescance as a known quantity of the bargain, by now, at least.

With airlines, the variability of routing, origin/destination weather and ground realities combined with traveller fatigue, long haul concerns like sleeping in shared liminal zones means degrees of conflict are always on the table, so stewards, ushers, hosts and attendants expect static and noise, but require home-court advantage to operate.

Basically, cell providers can operate from beyond line of sight with wireless automation. True utilities like water and power can solve for quality centrally, and reduce field service to a binary volume of supply verification.

Meanwhile, airlines and and cable/phone companies must supply near perfect end-to-end coverage, and verify quality assurance in places where you sleep, confronting tired cranky people, where they relax, AS they relax (or try and fail to do so). That fact can’t be dispelled with a hand wave.

I think there's a lot to that. I wonder if landline telephone is the best comparator for cable. It would be really interesting to dig into the history, especially around the AT&T breakup, to see if telephone at a similar stage had similar problems.

People wrote letters, and weren’t as dependent on the telephone. There were other options. Road rage wasn’t a thing, not too long ago.

Cable didn’t matter. Telephones didn’t matter. The internet didn’t exist. Things got done differently. Life followed a different pace.

People weren’t on psyche meds like they are now. Mental illness wasn’t diagnosed, or over-diagnosed for that matter. People drove drunk and chain smoked like it was nothing.

Things are different now. Outrage and misbehavior takes on different shapes, even if the signal to noise ratio is the same. We organize civilization according to different rules now.

It depends on where you were, because before the breakup there were still regional operating companies with their own management. In the 70s and 80s we had service from C&P Telephone, and did not have any of the problems that customers of Pacific Bell or New York Telephone were so familiar with. The good times lasted until the dawn of local competition (Bell Atlantic wouldn't install a line the next day because they weren't allowed to do it faster than a clec.) Then when Bell Atlantic bought NYNEX we started seeing all the terrible service problems that New Yorkers held so dear.

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”

There’s probably something regarding cultural differences between then and now.

Cameras weren’t everywhere, film processing required time, nothing went viral in the same ways it does now. This also meant people were more sheltered, expectations were lower, and maybe if you were exposed to a word of mouth black market underworld you knew a little more than those who were naive. But otherwise, even without rose colored glasses, people probably really were more polite by default (unless drunk, for which there might be a time and a place, usually).

But cultural differences aside, the technical aspects of deployment for both cable and public telephone networks followed comparable implementation models.

Originally, the household telephone handsets were proprietary appliances owned by the utility, it was installed by a technician and did not belong to the head of the household. This goes back to telegraphs, undersea cables and wire services which tie into banking networks also.

Back in the 80’s, cable television was new. Black and white television sets weren’t a complete anachronism yet, and rabbit ears were a thing. VHS and VCR appliances were also new. Things weren’t digital yet. Satellite dishes were luxurious and conspicuous to neighbors, and it was said that you could watch channles from other countries with one, including picking up European and Asian adult channels that broadcast nudity, all without any added cost. It was just available to the high gain receivers that could pick up the signals and tune into them.

Cable followed a private model, not a utility, and catered to people with enough money, who were sick of interference static and snowy noise disrupting a TV show. It appeared as trunk lines were put in place in geographic areas, but the technical details followed the telephone utilities, in that the set top box was a proprietary appliance not to be modified or replaced by the end user.

But it was all pretty low tech. Running a wire, plugging into a generic contact point. No special technicians with authorization were require to peer behind the curtain and know the black magic. No microchips, encryption or DRM that couldn’t be trivially overruled. It was mostly the same TV on the airwaves, but piped to the home on a conduit more reliable than the ambient electromagnetic spectrum. Cable companies simply “scrambled” an unpaid channel (there weren’t many to begin with) with an analog modulation that wasn’t much more complicated than interference signals introduced by music equipment, and there was a black market for descramblers that bypassed subscription fees, called hotboxes. You could also just splice into a neighbors line and pull in service for free (stealing cable). I think there’s a Simpsons episode about it.

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