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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands we now have a law where ISPs must allow your own choice of network equipment. This means they must give you the required information on how to connect your own device with their network.

I have a fiber connection, which I connected directly to a Ubiquity router through a suitable SFP module. My ISP supplied the information on the fiber type and which VLAN ID's to setup for internet, TV and telephony.

This way I have my own equipment, that I control myself. The 'modem' [0] which my ISP supplied is still in its original, unopened box.

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Same in Germany! ISPs hate it because it it makes their lives a lot harder - in cable networks, they now have to deal with a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium vs. a small set of standardized devices.

As a customer, I like it.

> ISPs hate it because it it makes their lives a lot harder - in cable networks, they now have to deal with a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium vs. a small set of standardized devices.

In other words, ISPs hate it because it forces them to actually do their jobs and be ISPs. The Internet itself is "a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium", and ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.

To bolster your point: Honestly they don't need to do much - the infrastructure is already there as a matter of being able to turn people's service up/down/on/off.

There is always a provider-managed CPE device that functions as the service demarcation point. This is the point where your contracted service speed is enforced (shape + egress queue and ingress policing).

You can have literally whatever router (dumb, smart, next-gen, whatever) spewing bits at X rate. The CPE will essentially normalize (police) that bit rate to your contracted speed (upstream scenario).

Not true for actually shared media on the last mile. (also, if it's not on Customer Premises it's not a CPE)

It's not the provision of Internet that's the problem, it's the customer service requests.

e.g., AT&T could provide perfect service to the home endpoint, but the customer bought some aftermarket router from their cousin, who had configured it for Verizon. Customer calls AT&T to holler. Tier 1 support doesn't know what that particular router config GUI even looks like, so it gets bumped to T2 or T3. Ultimately to find out that the customer's cousin had hardcoded DNS to some internal Verizon system that's not visible to AT&T.

Repeat x100K. ISPs job isn't just "provide the Internet," it's also "provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is"

Well, my understanding is that once you have your own router, it's up to you to ensure its configured correctly.

Exactly. I have my own router (and cable modem, for that matter), and I don't call Comcast when one of them breaks; I fix it myself, since I own them.

Problem is you'll eventually reach a point where the problem is deep and requires them to escalate, and if you aren't checking the box of tested customer cpe they'll stop. Example of this is when I found a Comcast backbone link with an incorrect/inconsistent MTU setting. Had to go back channel in the end to someone on the ibone team, but I had no chance in hell of getting that fixed promptly via regular support.

> you'll eventually reach a point where the problem is deep and requires them to escalate, and if you aren't checking the box of tested customer cpe they'll stop

I've been a Comcast customer for more than 20 years (in two different states) and have never encountered a problem like this, so I expect such problems are extremely rare. Every issue I've had has been of the kind where Comcast's support person can see right away that there's a problem on their end because they can't even see my cable modem's status even though I confirm to them that it's powered up and the cable is connected (and of course I have to go through the dance of rebooting it multiple times before they'll be satisfied). Most of the time they put me on hold for a while and then come back and the problem is fixed (I assume because some tech in the background rebooted or reset something that was borked). Once they had to send a tech to my house and it turned out there was a bad connection in the junction box they had installed outside.

> ISPs job isn't just "provide the Internet," it's also "provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is"

No ISP that I'm aware of will provide troubleshooting for devices they don't own. They just say "sorry, not our device, not our problem". When I installed my own cable modem and router, Comcast was quite clear about that. And I said "fine, no problem".

My ISP does, but they're the exception to the rule and cater to techies. Of course support questions for random devices need to be more specific than just "it doesn't work".

> My ISP does

Out of curiosity, which ISP do you have?

init7.net. They have a bunch of official guides, but also help with other devices and have debugged issues with new devices. Basically if your device is capable they want to make it work.

Init7 is great, I only had to tick a checkbox saying something like "I know what I am doing" and apart from providing the technical information they left me alone. Only had one problem with them that they resolved very quickly (the fiber cable got damaged somewhere in the basement).

+1 to init7. They've gone above and beyond when I needed them to change their routing policies to improve end to end latency to a specific destination. Good luck getting that from a major us carrier. And I wasn't even a customer.

The ISP I work for does, and it's a very large one (not in the US). If a router is not ours, we check for sync or if PPPoE is up. We tell the customer what's the result of our tests and offer a technician if they are willing to pay in case it's not our fault.

Most people are unwilling to pay, and yell at customer service. Most of the times, specially when the router has sync it's customer fault.

> we check for sync or if PPPoE is up.

The problem with this kind of procedure is that it's only a reasonable way to locate the problem when there are problems at that very moment. You're getting stonewalled when - during the day - you're reporting that it frequently loses sync during the night.

We can track sync changes, or really almost anything, crc errors, traffic, whatever we want really, although we only do it on demand.

You put a customer ID in the tracking system an it queries and stores results. It also performs analysis automatically, but most cases just puts the result in a frontend for analysis.

> provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is

People who don't even know what a router is don't buy their own equipment. Those who buy better routers don't require support for them, they call when there's a problem between the ISP and the router.

I disagree. If it is standard practice to BYOR, family or friends might give one to grandma, saying "use this, it will save you money".

I used to install satellite TV and saw this all the time. People would get old receivers from friends and family. Fortunately for me, the receivers were proprietary to that service (we don't use generic pay TV receivers in Canada) and the old ones were built like tanks. If people could have supplied any old cheap generic receiver, I probably would have had a bad time.

I work at an ISP of sorts. It is a regional research and education network. We are owned by our members. Heterogeneity is definitely par for the course, but that does not stop us from trying to roll out some ubiquity where we can. Many of our CPE routers are the same make and model, and that makes maintenance and analysis much less error prone. I.e. better service for our member institutions.

If you want an ISP whose competitive advantage is dealing with whatever crazy shit the edge throws at it, then that is your prerogative. But having some ground rules and baseline behavior makes it so that the ISP can focus on more rewarding tasks, such as negotiating peerings, establishing direct tunnels, improving network observability, and predicting necessary backbone upgrades.

> having some ground rules and baseline behavior

Doesn't "if you choose to use your own cable modem/router, it must meet the DOCSIS 3 specification" do this? That's the rule Comcast made me follow.

>The Internet itself is "a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium",

No, the shared medium in this case is referring the last part of the cable network where everyone in a neighborhood is transmitting effectively onto the same cable.

All it takes is a single device with a broken configuration to spew crap onto the wrong channels, taking down the whole neighborhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Physical_layer

On the Internet it stops being a shared medium the minute it gets out of the cable network into fiber/ethernet switched+routed interconnections.

That is a really good point and one I hadn't considered.

Is it really that easy for a single device to take down a neighborhood? For example, could a bad actor trivially disrupt a node with a modified modem? I guess that would be difficult to defend against.

I don't know enough about docsis to say if it has any protections against out-of-spec devices.

I don't know why I'm surprised when things outside my area of expertise are fragile, considering things inside my area of expertise are fragile.

> Is it really that easy for a single device to take down a neighborhood? For example, could a bad actor trivially disrupt a node with a modified modem? I guess that would be difficult to defend against.

Yes, similarly to how you could jam a radio frequency. Fortunately, this is rare and only ever happens due to hardware failures in modems.

Can't they still just provide you with a "modem" and give you full IP access through that? What difference does it make if they put the modem inside our outside your premises? (Eg they put a switch/DSLAM/modem into a box on the street and then they give you a cable?)

They also hate it, because they cannot charge rent, like for the ISP owned router.

That's very uncommon in Germany, most ISPs provide a router for free and only charge for upgrades to more expensive ones.

I have Spectrum cable Internet. I use their modem, but I supply my own router, and they've never given me any trouble. In fact, they recently upgraded my modem (from a Scientific Atlanta 2203C to a Ubee E31U2V1) and they didn't send me a router. The Ubee E31U2V1, like the Scientific Atlanta 2203C before it, only has one Ethernet port, and their official guide to getting the new modem working involved rebooting an external router, so there's no possible way they have a problem with customer-owned routers.

Which works out great for me. I can use OpenWRT with no hassle.

More to the point, I see the cable stuff as "ISP land" in that it's directly interfacing with their internal hardware, and so has to dance to their tune very directly, whereas Ethernet and TCP/IP are common, and so will obey my rules in my home. I don't expect my modem to perform adblocking, which is why my router does it, and I'm not going to be stupid and try to "uncap" my modem to get more speed, so I don't see a point to being able to provide my own cable modem. As long as I can own the router which provides the only path in and out of my LAN, I can do everything I'm capable of doing anyway, as far as I can see.

> I don't see a point to being able to provide my own cable modem

Other cable providers (e.g. Comcast) charge you a monthly fee (~$5-15) to rent their modem. Buying a modem gets cost effective pretty quickly.

I use my own one because the $2 Huawei ones perform really poorly, they’re the source of a large portion of general internet performance issues for a lot of people.

> I'm not going to be stupid and try to "uncap" my modem to get more speed

I think this modem "uncapping" thing has mostly been an urban myth. Maybe there were some really early cable modem systems in the 90s where that would have been possible, but AFAIK with DOCSIS the speed is regulated by the CMTS [0], not the modems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system

> I think this modem "uncapping" thing has mostly been an urban myth. Maybe there were some really early cable modem systems in the 90s where that would have been possible, but AFAIK with DOCSIS the speed is regulated by the CMTS [0], not the modems.

It depends in precisely what CMTS is running, what firmware it has and the ISP's willingness to replace/upgrade old hardware at great expense.

At the last telco I worked for we had about 12 CMTS's, and 2 of them were holding up a bunch of upgrades because of their age. One of the things they specifically couldn't do was provision the speed of the individual circuits.

The US has (had?) some network neutrality rules around discriminating against different types of hardware, but AT&T just does it anyway. (They require you to use their DSL modem + router + wifi and it has broken support for adding a second router behind it.)

Dealing with the same thing with AT&T fiber. There was word of a hack involving putting your router behind a switch with the AT&T router after cloning the MAC, then booting them both up and letting your router pick up the DHCP responses along with the AT&T router. Once the AT&T router had done its proprietary handshake, you could disconnect the AT&T router.

Unfortunately I had no luck with that - my loose theory is that my EdgeRouter was doing a ping check to see if the IP was already taken before accepting the DHCP lease...

I was able to get "IP passthrough" mode working with the AT&T router though. The key hiccup was that the AT&T router had to be on a different subnet than my router's LAN subnet.

I just moved to SF and got AT&T gigabit fiber in mid-February. I followed this guide and got it working at gigabit speeds (eventually): https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/cjw9jt/howto_bypa...

It's been working great since I set it up; highly recommended!

Hardware offloading needs to be enabled and QoS disabled for gigabit speeds (~900Mbps both ways, simultaneous ~500Mbps both ways).

If you send me an email (hn-202003@jonpurdy.com), I can send you my exact configs.

I don't know if it's "law" in America but I've never seen a major ISP give any more guff than sometimes making a technician come out to read the modem's MAC address. I've never had a ISP's router or modem on my networks

Same. From my experience you can use a modem of your choice, you just need to provide your MAC address to your ISP and its good to go.

What's you cost and speed of the fiber?

Also, if you didn't need so much bandwidth, is it possible to just order a basic 100Mb/10mb connection for a nominal fee of, say, 30Euro?

The speeds in the US aren't actually that bad, but you're basically forced to pay for everything: paid cable TV, equipment rental fees, etc, and your $40 plan ends up creeping towards $100 / month after the fees and taxes, with increases every year.

Don't know about NL, but in Hungary and a lot of other EU countries you can get 100Mb/10Mb for about 10 EUR, gigabit for 20-30.

Central / East Europe sounds like a paradise sometimes. Cheap rent, more conservative cultures, and fast internet at low speeds.

What I'm guessing, though, is that 10EUR internet and 200EUR apartment rentals are the equivalent of our $70 internet and $1500 one bedroom apartments when adjusted for salaries.

This varies greatly by locale and is not uniform across the USA. In Berkeley, California I have fiber service that terminates in my own equipment, no rented equipment and no bundled services (TV, phone, etc). It's nominally symmetric gigabit service for $40/month.

For me, in NL, it's about 55 Euro per month for 200/200 fiber and TV (including fees and taxes). Unfortunately this increases every year in NL as well.

As far as I'm aware, UK doesn't have a law like this, but I've never had a situation where an ISP cared, they just tell you that if you have problems they might not be able to help. I think you get interop issues with TV and landline with those ISPs where everything is bundled into one fibre, but the internet bit usually works fine.

It's the same in New Zealand, my particular ISP offers IPoE[0]. I have a repurposed PowerEdge R210II connected as a firewall/router.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoE

This law is a tech-support nightmare.

You can call your ISP with any arbitrary piece of non-branded random AliExpress $#@$ of a network eq. and they must walk you through configuring it? That does not make much sense to me.

Or it is strong motivation to be the perfectly standard dumb pipe the user wanted to pay for in the first place.

No, they have to provide the required values.

Parent note that the ISP provide a router anyway. It's safe to assume that most people will simply use that, if not for the support just because it is already there.

Yeah this. My mom isn't ever going to add a 3rd party router. Even most of the technical people I know (well paid python devs, etc.) probably wouldn't mess the on-prem ISP gear.

I do network engineering for a living, so I totally would, but I'm an outlier compared to the rest of the population.

Do you know if this applies to cable modems too? Are they required to allow a 3rd party modem that they normally wouldn't provide to customers?

I'm not completely sure about this, as I don't have a cable connection to my house (only fiber) so I never paid attention. But AFIAK the major cable providers here allow you to configure the supplied modem-router into passthrough mode (thus, only acting as a modem) so you can install your own router behind it.

I have never met someone who attempted to install their own cable modem. I do know that the cable modulation standard (DOCSIS) is wildly complicated, so even buying the right type of cable modem for your connection would be challenging. There may also be licensing issues involved that would prevent you from buying such modem completely.

I know some cable ISPs outside NL will allow it if your modem is from a reputable brand without any known issues (and compatible with whatever DOCSIS version they're using of course). Ziggo's "connectbox" modem/router even in bridge mode has quite poor latency stability so I was hoping I could use this law to persuade them to activate an Arris SURFboard or some other decent brand modem.

It's been more common for DSL too, but I haven't heard of anyone using their own DOCSIS modem for Ziggo though. Have you?

How can you do without the modem? Which ubiquity product is that?

Typically, FTTH doesn't require a "modem".

In my case, I have VZ Fios in the northeast US. Their termination point at my house has an RJ45 Ethernet connection. It goes directly to my pfSense router.

So they actually have an ONT somewhere and provides you with a RJ45 Ethernet port only?

This is brilliant! Why aren't more ISP doing it? I dont want another ONT / Modem / piece of equipment in my flat.

Same in New Zealand.

There's a Huawei ONT fixed to the wall in the cupboard under the stairs, which is owned by the fibre network company.

I have a short length of cat6 connecting that to my own router, and the fibre network company patched the far end to my choice of ISP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband#Technolog...

Usually (always?) the way FiOS works is that every subscriber gets his own ONT. That ONT can be configured to output network bits on either an RJ45 port or using MoCA.

For many people MoCA is more convenient because most houses and apartments are already wired for "cable", ie RG-6 for television purposes. FiOS is offered as a "triple play" service: internet, TV, and phone. Cable is the TV part of that.

There usually isn't an existing Cat 6 connection from the ONT to the living area of the "flat". (Except we don't have "flats" here in the USA). So Verizon will use MoCA to send bits to a more conveniently located wireless access point that they can also supply.

When Verizon installed my FiOS I didn't want to deal with MoCA or their access point, so I had them run Ethernet from the ONT to my den.

I'm not clear on your objection to an ONT. They way GPON works is that the ONT has to be somewhere nearby; if it's not in your flat it still has to be elsewhere in the apartment building.

>I'm not clear on your objection to an ONT.

Just one less pieces of equipment really. Having an RJ45 cable directly to Router is just a much cleaner solution. For those of us living in a extremely small sub 200 Square Feet apartment, getting rid of an equipment results in less cluster.

I used the Unifi Security Gateway to replace my ISP's modem.

Fiber internet (at least where I live) is just a TCP/IP connection. You could even connect it straight to your PC and it would work.

So, I use a SFP module that it suitable for the wavelength and mode of my fiber connection, and plugged that in an Ubiquity Edgerouter. In case of my ISP I had to configure a VLAN on the external interface, as they use separate VLANs for internet, TV and telephony. Once you configure the VLAN, the router will receive an IP address over DHCP and you'll be online.

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