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Comment by tormock | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, Comcast tried to start charging me 2.5x for my Internet service... I called to cancel the service and all of a sudden, they were able to give me the old price...

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They may secretly start throttling you/adding latency to get you to call back. I may be crazy, but after I renegotiated a higher speed for a lower price, I have been having all kinds of crazy latency/timeout issues that don't happen on a VPN.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you call a few times to complain about your network speed, the problems have a way of just disappearing.

If the isp throttles you, why they left vpn connections alone? My guess it's just suboptimal peering on their part and/or overloaded dns server. Those are my top issues with my ISP and they're gone with vpn (vpn providers has different peering and their own dns server).

Yes, it could be. What are some good tools to debug every step in the connection? Traceroute doesn't seem super useful in this case.

I have custom DNS setup, that didn't seem to improve it much.

BTW traffic being faster in a VPN is pretty common for ISP throttling, for whatever reason.

Basically just traceroute, and perhaps combined with looking up your isp's peering information (and their peer's peering information, depending on how deep you want to investigate them) on peeringdb.com . For example, you might discover your isp will use route traffics to a certain website via a slow peer based on your traceroute information and data on peeringdb.com.

But like you said, it's not useful to us as a customer of an ISP because we can't alter the routing table used by the ISP even if we identified a problematic routes/peers. You can try to complain to their customer support, and might get lucky if the customer support has technical authority to debug peering issues.

I still get 5ms ping in CSGO and they upped my limit from 1tb/month to 1.2t/month....

I don't think that would have anything to do with latency. 5ms ping is also pretty good...

Retention department is always a great place to get a deal for this type of thing. Same with wireless.

Sadly, in my experience this only works if there's a viable competitor in your area. Last time I asked to be transferred to the retention department, after getting nowhere with the Comcast rep, the only question they had for me was "what date should we process the disconnect for?"

When it happened in my area they told me they (Comcast) couldnt compete the the fiber service in my city in term of cost and speed. They didn't even try to retain.

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