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Comment by ecliptik | Hacker News Reader

Years ago at the house we were renting our cable Internet would have intermittently go down. It would only last a couple of minutes and only happened in the mornings when the sun was coming up.

I was convinced that somehow the line from our house to the pole in the alley was bad and when the sun was warming it up it caused the issues. The cable company refused to fix it since they never saw a problem on their end by the time I would reach customer support.

My solution was to upgrade to business cable Internet, which was about the same price we were already paying, just required signing a 1 year contract.

First day the new service was active, called business support and 2 days later they came out and replaced the line. No issues after that.

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I too went with the 'business class' cable a couple of years ago. In my market, it's dollar-for-dollar slower than the consumer grade (I get 250Mbps where I'd get probably the 500Mbps consumer package for the same price), but in exchange I get an actual SLA that they mostly adhere to. Given my WFH gig, it's worth every penny to have an outage addressed (if not resolved completely) in 4 hours rather than 2-5 business days.

I was facing consistent multi-hour outages during the workday and looked into business internet options with my ISP (Cox) and from what I could gather they _did't even offer_ any plans with an SLA in my market.

Well, yes Cox objectively sucks. But to your point, someone offers internet connectivity in your area with an SLA; the question is at what cost and how much a backhoe might be involved.

I loathe Cox for many reasons mostly related to their unpredictable usage policies (perennial shenanigans with the word "unlimited"), adversarial customer support and messaging, and high prices with dark patterns re: bundling and promotions. (though honestly these complaints seem par for the course when it comes to American ISPs.)

Buuut at least in my neck of the woods they offer wifi with excellent coverage over the neighborhood that you can sign into with your Cox account. I've used it as a backup (eg during power outages) several times. Not a bad perk.

Though I loathe Cox for several reasons, in my neck of the woods, they offer wifi with excellent coverage over the neighborhood. Captive portal can be logged into with Cox account credentials.

I've used it several times as a backup, e.g. during power outages. Not a bad perk.

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