Hacker News Reader

Comment by raintrees | Hacker News Reader

Our ISP (Spectrum) refuses to work with customer-supplied equipment. Even when I have proven their equipment to be faulty - I still had to wait a day or two for a technician. And having a business account, at least it was that quick. My residential neighbors can sometimes wait up to a week for remedy, and are frequently told things like "check with your neighbors to see if they have service" when reporting service problems.

View on HN

Eh? I have Spectrum and use my own modem and router... It's even advertised as something I can do.

You both seem to be right. According to [1], residential customers can use Spectrum-approved modem models, but business customers must use Spectrum-provided modems. (I use my own modem with Spectrum too.)

[1] https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/compliant-modems-c...

I have Spectrum and got really lucky with the one technician I've had. He spent over two hours fixing the faulty cable line from the utility pole to our house, and then another 15-20 minutes on the phone getting them to activate my customer-owned modem (why that's a 20min call is beyond me).

But tbh that's been my experience with most technicians accross ISPs, they're generally nice and willing to fix a problem once they're there. It's getting the office to actually send one out (like you said) that's the issue...

similarly lucky as the other person who replied

checked the spectrum website for compatible modems available on the market, ordered a DOCSIS 3.0 Motorola Surfboard and when the technician came in, he pulled cable across our (admittedly tiny) apartment to where I had all my networking gear mounted to the wall on 3M strips

great experience

the actual internet itself, not so much, but that has a lot more to do with the terrible nest of interconnects in older apartment buildings in New York than Spectrum's upstream network capacity

Reply on news.ycombinator.com