Hacker News Reader

Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

>The average consumer may honestly be better off getting a cable tech to come out and fix their broken router than buying their own and trying to figure it each time something goes wrong (which is arguably rare, but very problematic when you have no clue).

From my experience, the hardware the ISP provides goes wrong far more often than the modem/router I purchased. The combo units my local Comcast affiliate leases out are a mess of problems, and I know multiple people that have gotten fed up with support never fixing the issue and just accept the frequent problems.

I had similar problems until I bought my own modem and router. Even if you have to pay someone to fix the rare breakdowns, I'd still advocate bringing your own router/modem.

View on HN

>The combo units my local Comcast affiliate leases out are a mess of problems, and I know multiple people that have gotten fed up with support never fixing the issue and just accept the frequent problems.

TW->Spectrum where I live seems to have a pretty common practice of simply taking the modem from customer 1 complaining about internet dropout/etc and giving it to customer 2 complaining about internet dropouts.

Besides the bad router hardware, in my experience with the cable companies, a large part of the problem has been signal issues going through old cables, splitters, etc. The one advantage to owning your own modem is you can select one that gives you good signal quality metrics and error reporting.

Which brings me to what I view as the fundamental issue here. The cable companies frankly don't give a crap about service quality. They _CAN_ monitor signal strength, dropped packets, signal loss, etc from their end. With that they could act proactively, like "Hey this customer's modem won't lock on 1/2 of our frequencies lets call them and send a tech to fix it".

But they don't, and really that tells me everything I need to know about those companies.

You can just call them and ask to check signal strength etc on their end.

Frankly I have better things to do with my time.

And every time you call them you have to spend half an hour of your limited time on this planet convincing them that yes, you did already try turning it off and on again...

You can, as can most readers here. I've always had fantastic luck with it. If you are kind and sound competent on the phone, they are much more inclined to roll a truck to look at the issue. If you're likewise kind and prepared when the tech shows up, they are much more inclined to actually address the issue for real rather than pretending.

Knowing already where the wire comes into your house from the splitter is a big help too.

On the converse, people I know who aren't patient on the phone, or can't get to their modem when a tech shows up, or are just plain angry complaining about the service don't get anywhere.

When my neighborhood was built out, they apparently used "the wrong cable" and it seems to be at effective EOL. Everybody I know who is nice and somewhat technical has had no problem getting it replaced. The people who get on facebook and talk about how horrible Spectrum is continue to have problems.

Your internet doesn't work? Bummer, darn...

I find that if you tell the tech who's setting up your combo gateway-router that you're planning on using it with your own router, and so request that they set their gateway up in bridge mode (deactivating not only the routing, but also its wireless AP) then a lot of the flakiness goes away.

The gateway part on these little appliance-boxes is usually pretty solid (with any problems people experience usually being line or head-end problems); it's the router part that has all the shite code. (Remember, at least for cable Internet, all the gateways are sitting on a shared medium. If the gateway logic in the box wasn't solid, it'd be causing the ISP problems, by interfering with other customers. By the anthropic principle, the gateways that survive to be purchased+distributed by ISPs are the ones that don't cause them such problems, and therefore the ones that have robust gateway code.)

I have a Comcast router modem combo(group contract through HOA, so free for me). My advertised is 125 Mbps and I do hit close to 125 when I use many of those speed test websites.

When I set this hardware in bridge mode and try to use my own router with dd-wrt, my speeds drop to below 50 Mbps.

I could never figure out why.

What speed did you get in bridge mode with a single PC directly connected to the modem? Perhaps your router was hitting some hardware performance limit when doing NAT and everything at full speed.

No different. The speed even with ethernet never go above 50-55 mbps.

If you are already setting up your own router, it seems like a huge waste to rent just the modem from them. Setting up your own cable modem requires little more than plugging it in, and your ISP should offer support if it's one of their approved modems.

With the current regulation regime, bringing your own modem on spectrum has meant that you give up the ability to get the highest performing tiers. This despite the fact that the modems on the open market were actually better/more capable than the spectrum only modem (aka not available publicly) they were giving people for the gigabit access. (this BTW just recently changed).

Even more fun, is that they regularly refuse to provision a modem at its full capability despite your service tier. AKA you have a modem that does X, and a tier that does X, but they will only provision it for 1/2X (and not bother to tell you that). A few years ago I fought a long protracted battle with their support/escalation/etc over a few months to get my modem qualified at the higher tiers and in the end the best excuse they gave was that it was a business decision.

AKA, making me upgrade my modem for no technical reason played into their ploy for renting me one.

What company was this? Couldn't you just fake your vendor to them somehow by spoofing your mac address?

I wouldn't trust my ISP with my router, but i bought my own cable modem off their approved list to avoid rental fees. However, if you look more deeply into that, it's an approved modem because the ISP does have access to full management of that hw down to fw upgrades - and to give some credit, the modem portion does seem to work seamlessly.

That is the thing, long time ago I thought this would be a good trend because it give incentive for ISP to improve the Router Modem Combo, so they would have less support call to deal with ( and better customer experience ). Turns out they dont want any of that, they just want to charge you for convenience.

I actually wish ONT are standardised like DSL Modem, so anyone could bring their own ONT / Modem with a username and password. I think Germany allows consumer to choose or bring their own equipment.

Ditto. Mediacom router, wifi goes out every other day (and this is common). Suddenly you are using pricey phone data instead of cheap Mediacom data. No warning till you look at the usage meter.

But with my Motorola router wifi never goes out.

I second this.

I had to reboot my ISPs hardware 1-2 times a month.

I bought my own and had to reboot it once in 12 months. The connection is slightly faster as well and much more consistent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com