Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephmosby | Hacker News Reader

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"

View on HN

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com