ISPs say their "excellent customer service" is why users don't switch providers | Hacker News Reader

ISPs say their "excellent customer service" is why users don't switch providers

arstechnica.com

186 pointsalsetmusic133 comments

"Businesses will lie to customers and regulators as much as they're allowed to get away with because it's good for profits."

Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.

In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.

Natural Monopoly?

Theres a natural Pit and Pipe monopoly, but ISPs are hardly bound to it. The Pit and Pipe asset is a gift from the federal government to Telstra, who sold it to NBN for a steal. There are multiple fibre companies in a lot of our pits. PIPE, Vocus, Optus. They are prevented by legislation from diverting any of that asset towards residential users. The only exception where theres any kind of competition at all, was TPG taking NBN to court over apartment buildings, otherwise its illegal to overbuild NBN. The penalty is quite hefty too.

In fact NBN is being directed to overbuild other fibre providers. NBN says, we arent coming to this community. Community organises their own fibre. NBN says hey we actually do want to be in this market now. Now its a legal grey area as to whether the existing provider can continue their rollout.

Thats before we get into fixed wireless. I spent 99% of the NBN "debate" with a 300M residential fixed wireless service. Shady operators give it a bad name, but a well engineered wireless link is a godsend.

We had a functional market in this country. It was ULL. Legislation forced Telstra (through gritted teeth) to sell ULL copper instead of reselling their services. It lead to the largest sharpest increase in internet speeds in this country. The ULL model allows providers to provide their own hardware and upgrade it as demand requires. It removes a middle man from their logical networks. Why we trashed this model for an NBN cost recovery makes no sense. Singapore rents glass, it was a big undertaking and it has been extremely successful. Companies competing to be the first to roll out 5/10/100 gig services.

Any discussion in this area needs to acknowledge it is illegal for me to rent pit and run a fibre cable into a residential dwelling thats already serviced by the NBN. There's nothing natural about it.

The other thing the government (specifically, Graeme Samuel, Rod Sims and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) did was structure the NBN so that small operators couldn't join without buying connectivity from one of the large incumbent players.

The original model for the NBN was that there would be 14 points of interconnection nationally, which means if you were a smallish ISP you only need a physical presence in 14 locations to be able to offer service on the NBN nationally. That was the clear preference of NBNco itself, and the smaller (often regional) ISPs who now had a real shot at becoming national operators and challenging large incumbents like Telstra, Optus and TPG.

The ACCC decided that it does not, in fact, want to foster or support competition and that it wanted to continue the status quo, where a handful of large telcos control the market. NBN instead ended up with 121 POIs, which only the best capitalised carriers could service. That lead to massive consolidation in the market; many small to mid sized players either closed up shop or sold out to operations like TPG, and the small operators who survived now buy wholesale connectivity from the incumbents.

Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.

I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.

Suspicously easy.

Yeah, the Australian Government was never going to structurally separate Telstra because it would have trashed the share price, which would have made them look bad because they were the ones that sold it off to create the Future Fund (public sector pension fund, sort-of).

Telstra's behaviour post-privatisation somewhat precipitated the creation of NBNco.

"structurally separate Telstra because it would have trashed the share price,"

I've whinged for years about the fact that Australia is the world's expert in fucking up communications services and it has done so for nearly a century, and it's cost the Australian public many billions of dollars (for some reason Oz people are like sheep, unfortunately they let governments and Big Business walk all over them and don't complain).

I even challenged HN readers to come up with a country that made a worse mess of its communications and I've had no takers!

It's not only the sale of Telstra that governments of both persuasions have fucked up, one only needs to see a litany of disasters with the NBN, and just wait until it's divided up among unscrupulous money-grubbing telcos, the Telstra sale will begin to look benign in comparison.

What are my reasons you may well ask. I've said them all previously on HN and elsewhere, the latest only a week or so ago, it's here if you're interested:

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42104578

>I even challenged HN readers to come up with a country that made a worse mess of its communications and I've had no takers!

Canada.

OK. Reasons, instances?

I rather like my views being changed by good arguments/new facts. :-)

Great vestiges of the British Empire both. Kowtowing to the modern version of the aristocracy. The more things change the more they stay the same.

And I agree, but it's also complex socioeconomic problem. That's not to say they're not interrelated because they are. Of course, the devil's in the detail—coupling factor(s), etc. (See my rather late reply to protocolture. Often by the time I bother to check replies the story is long dead). :-)

Sounds as easy as switching phone providers in Poland.

And how much did the Liberals and Murdoch media hate that?

I got my FTTH connection a full ten years later than I would have if they hadn't fucked with the original plan. I can't forgive them for that. It's not even personal, it was holding back the progress of the entire country.

The behaviour of Optus and Telstra at the time dictated that the only way to do it properly was to have it done by the government. And they were right, because it was 'for Australia', not for private companies' shareholders.

100% agree. Abbott should be held to account for this forever. The plan wasn't perfect, but the way they messed it up for purely political point-scoring (and keeping Murdoch happy) was criminal.

"Wasnt Perfect" is the understatement of a lifetime.

The original plan was killed by the ACCC. You are thinking of the Rod Sims ACCC "engineered" plan written by the big 4 telcos (expanding the network to 121 POIs, preventing NBN from competing against fibre backhaul providers, generally making it hell for small players to compete), that would deliver FTTH but not the capacity or competition to make it viable. And we would still be undertaking the physical roll out.

The LNP made the last mile worse by some metrics, but they vastly improved the economics. Its a testament to how bad their PR is that they have failed to capitalise on it politically.

Strongly disagree that they improved the economics at all.

I will say that, if they did improve the economics, then I agree that 'something' failed in getting that point across. They did crow about how bad the original economics was, but really just using scare tactics by quoting the large number that out's of the range of reasonable comparison by the average citizen. Most information I read was that they wasted additional money including paying for a lot, like a lot lot, of copper for last mile connections, including paying Telstra for some of their existing copper infrastructure - the dilapidated state of which was part of the reason that FTTH was the proposed solution for 9x% of the Australian population.

In fact, it's almost impossible that improved economics making changes and causing the (decade+ in some cases) delay of the rollout of FTTH.

One of my favourite pieces of graffiti: https://gadgetguy-assets.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wor...

I'm happy to be told I'm wrong, along with explanations, or if there are mitigating factors to anything I've written above.

Edited to add: My rant may be on a different interpretation of 'economics' than which you're referring to. Mine's purely based on the cost of the project - not how it's been charged to ISPs or Customers.

Edited to add post-reply below: Thanks for the detailed reply, that's very interesting information that I had read peripheral information around, but was less intimate with. Thanks for taking the time, two thumbs up.

When I refer to the economics, I refer to the market that the NBN act creates. This is largely divorced from political spending, like purchasing the Optus HFC network to which you refer.

The original labor approved cost for accessing the network made it unreasonable to purchase enough CVC to provide services for customers.

Bevan Slattery used to discuss this alot, but NBN had the capability, and in one case threatened to use that capability, to cut off any wholesalers they like. So Bevan was the only one in a place to really publicly criticise them. A gentleman I know wrote a whitepaper about how bad the NBN Fixed Wireless service was and his employer forced him to scour it from the internet after threats from NBN Co.

So as to publicly allowed criticism of NBN Co you dont get much other than that.

I will see if I can dredge up the numbers.

Under labors watch, they assigned engineers and specialists to design a fibre network. It was over engineered (should have been ULL with no active hardware) but we didnt get that. It was to consist of 21 points of interconnect and effectively would have provided an alternative to buying backhaul from Telstra/AAPT etc.

The ACCC, after prompting from the big 4, changed the plan to include 121 points of interconnect. NBN co also mandated that Wholesalers be able to reach a very large number of them before they could connect to the system (with a plan for all 121).

What they didnt do was change the pricing structure. So now to play ball, you now need 100 more points of presence on your network (very expensive) and you are paying a quite hefty fee for an extremely small amount of CVC. NBN Expected that more CVC would be purchased by providers, but as it worked out, this did not occur. Some providers purchased more CVC just to get started, and then phased it out. Others didnt bother. Ultimately, CVC proved to be lossmaking for ISPs, who at best had a dollar after the customers monthly sub with which to find Support/Hardware/all their other costs. This lead to a significant number of user complaints, regardless of last mile tech.

LNP pops in, and they are looking for any way they can "fix labors mistake". ISP lobbying finally makes an impact and NBN starts bundling in CVC. The LNP also mostly stop talking about the NBN becoming a return on investment in x years, which takes pressure off of NBNCo to needle ISPs. This is where people with fibre connections started going from just having less dropouts, to having very significant speed increases versus other technology types. ISPs gained a very small amount of breathing room (still heaps of room for improvement) and the economics were somewhat improved.

The thing is, the LNP didnt market this success. They went and fiddled around with the rest of the project, bought the optus network etc and campaigned on that nonsense instead. Really if they wanted to they should have done more to highlight and correct the actual failures of the NBN rather than the issues their donors had but w/e.

"A gentleman I know wrote a whitepaper about how bad the NBN Fixed Wireless service was and his employer forced him to scour it from the internet after threats from NBN Co."

I know, this bullying and like threats are just part of a much bigger problem. As I've said in my post to this story, that's just part of a much bigger problem with Australian communications and communications policy. When it comes to Australian governments and communications what we end up with is inevitably some sort of major fuck-up, and often it's monumental.

If I were an alien I'd draw the conclusion that Australian people have a congenital abnormality that makes them lose all sense and reason when they hear strings that contain words like 'communications'. What else could it be, the fuck-ups are continuous and span over a century?

Methinks, some grad student could likely get a PhD sorting this out and pinning the blame. Oh, but what a horrible job!

I think the Australian disease is an addiction to the great big national solution.

If 1 state is falling behind, they strip all the states of the responsibility and push ONE MASSIVE SOLUTION to everything.

NDIS? We had years of disabled people complaining that their state benefits were better, or lost completely after the NDIS rollout before they got their nonsense together. Now its always new and interesting ways the scheme is failing.

NBN? You could hand pit and pipe to local councils to rent out, but nah we need another failed monopoly.

Housing? Make sure states are meeting their land release obligations? Nope needs a massive funding splash from the federal government.

Education? We used to use the US as an example of poor education policy. Standardised tests? Nope those force teachers to teach the test rather than teach the child. Suddenly, national curriculum and standardised tests. Genius.

Right. From my experience philosophising over the national characteristics aren't of much help as it changes nothing. Nevertheless, I find it very frustrating whenever the matter comes to the fore during debates over such issues.

It seems to me that to change a nation's character is a long involved process and it usually involves considerable stress on its population such as war, economic depression, etc., and almost no one wants those catastrophes. Moreover, such dramatic influences can take many years to manifest.

(As a point, have you noticed how well many of the nations that lost, say, WWII have done economically thereafter? It's difficult to generalise but there are many instances from history where losers rise victorious from the ashes. It can be argued the Ancient Greeks benefited from Rome's takeover, in more modern times look at Japan's and Germany's prosperity. At war's end who'd have ever thought a German manufacturer would get own a large part of the company that made the amazing British Spitfire or that Germany would become Europe's biggest economy?)

Alternatively, changing the national character of a country can also be achieved by educating its population but that too can take many, many decades—even then, it's often not successful.

For instance, take the current debate in Australia over nuclear power, it has become politically polarised to the extent that protagonists on both sides have upped the ante to a point where logical debate is lost in the noise. Both sides and the Country are losers.

I was once employed in the nuclear industry (on the regulatory side) so I have some understanding of its pros and cons, so I watch from the sidelines with dismay whilst this acrimonious, mostly ill-informed debate continues.

Thus, Australia will only decide conclusively which technology it's going to follow long after the rest of the world has come to a definitive conclusion. Either way, the Country will have left the ball too late to catch, by then it'll be too late to develop sufficiently advanced tech to compete competitively. Australia has a long history in this regard, it seems incapable of overcoming this handicap. (BTW, this has little or nothing to do with the ingenuity or inventiveness of its citizens.)

Many argue that Australia has only a small population thus cannot complete with larger nations. To that I'd argue poppycock—look at Finland with Nokia and the Netherlands with ASML—the most advanced manufacturer of UV lithography in the world.

Both of these counties have smaller populations than Australia, so they demonstrate that not only is it possible for smaller economies to develop high tech industries that can compete on the international stage but also that it's actually doable.

Also, take a look at South Korea with a population of about double that of Oz and its megalith Samsung. Or take a fairer comparison Taiwan with its slightly smaller population, it has the world's most important semiconductor foundry—TSMC. Tech from the Netherlands's ASML is used by TSMC to make the world's most advanced semiconductor chips, those used in high-tech computers, AI and such.

Rousseau in his Social Contract long ago defined what he called the 'national will'. Those countries I've mentioned have had and still have the national will to achieve those things whereas Australia does not.

This is not a political statement but a fact based on observation. Why Australia prefers to dig minerals out of the ground and sell them unprocessed abroad or why it sells gas/LPG internationally thus upping its local consumption price (effectively to above parity) and significantly disadvantaging its own citizens—not to mention making local availability a major problem—is the 64-million dollar question. It's bizarre that the Oz population isn't up in arms screaming.

I have my views but raising them here would only inflame the debate—no matter what I said would anger many.

Powerless, I only watch such debates in utter frustration.

>(As a point, have you noticed how well many of the nations that lost, say, WWII have done economically thereafter? It's difficult to generalise but there are many instances from history where losers rise victorious from the ashes. It can be argued the Ancient Greeks benefited from Rome's takeover, in more modern times look at Japan's and Germany's prosperity. At war's end who'd have ever thought a German manufacturer would get own a large part of the company that made the amazing British Spitfire or that Germany would become Europe's biggest economy?)

Yep. James mays "The Peoples Car" goes into depth on this a few times. Comparing the economics of cars and car owners between winners and losers of WW2.

>For instance, take the current debate in Australia over nuclear power, it has become politically polarised to the extent that protagonists on both sides have upped the ante to a point where logical debate is lost in the noise. Both sides and the Country are losers.

Its terrible. We have been working towards good pro nuclear positions in this country for decades, and Dutton comes along and destroys them all with his crazy SMR proposal. And now, anyone who suggests that nuclear can be a viable alternative is branded the same as Dutton.

>Thus, Australia will only decide conclusively which technology it's going to follow long after the rest of the world has come to a definitive conclusion. Either way, the Country will have left the ball too late to catch, by then it'll be too late to develop sufficiently advanced tech to compete competitively. Australia has a long history in this regard, it seems incapable of overcoming this handicap. (BTW, this has little or nothing to do with the ingenuity or inventiveness of its citizens.)

Theres an old story that Mad Max had to become popular in the united states before Australians would go and watch it.

>Many argue that Australia has only a small population thus cannot complete with larger nations. To that I'd argue poppycock—look at Finland with Nokia and the Netherlands with ASML—the most advanced manufacturer of UV lithography in the world.

Australian government has this weird paralysis where they never left the colonial mindset. The question is not what should Australia do, its what would the UK or the USA prefer australia do.

>Rousseau in his Social Contract long ago defined what he called the 'national will'. Those countries I've mentioned have had and still have the national will to achieve those things whereas Australia does not.

Australia had a national will for like 12 non consecutive weeks in the 1920s.

>This is not a political statement but a fact based on observation. Why Australia prefers to dig minerals out of the ground and sell them unprocessed abroad or why it sells gas/LPG internationally thus upping its local consumption price (effectively to above parity) and significantly disadvantaging its own citizens—not to mention making local availability a major problem—is the 64-million dollar question. It's bizarre that the Oz population isn't up in arms screaming.

Ditto Uranium, Lithium etc. Its insane,

>Powerless, I only watch such debates in utter frustration. Yep.

Please, lets not hold Australia up as any kind of bastion of internet wonderfulness.

Didn't they end up taxing competitors who didn't use the government owned network?

I first thought "why did someone submit an onion article", but it is arstechnica.

If there was competition fir ISPs, everyone in my area would move off of comcast the first chance they get.

What you get from competition is the incentive to lay down fiber optics, so that you attract customers with your higher speeds and can rent the infrastructure to your competition. Though there are other forces at work in urban areas, in my area I know a lot of people out in the 'burbs with fiber optics while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best. Not sure what's happening there, and I imagine is where municipal internet can help (with both the taxpayer dollars and bipartisan buy-in for it).

On the customer service front, the painpoint is usually related to mobile networks. It's very painful to switch from one carrier to another, with limited time offers to keep you or upselling when you've decided to join. It's when this spills over into their internet services that I want to get off the grid entirely.

From your post, it seems the European internet and mobile market is much more competitive than the US one. And yet much more regulated. It seems that’s two markets where EU regulations have actually created both enough competition (still not a lot of providers, 3, 4 everywhere) and constraints on the licensees to give us cheap very high speed fiber and painless mobile switch (number portability). Is your city dense? It’s so weird that the center would be left out of fiber when generally that’s where carriers prefer to lay it first.

>while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best

If you're in the U.S. probably exclusive provider revenue share agreements with apartment buildings. The ISP gets exclusive access to the building and the building owner gets a % of ISP revenue.

Anecdotally, that rev share can be tens of thousands a year.

Most people here would not. Comcast is a fun punching bag but for the most part it works fine for most people.

Later

Sorry, when I said "here", I meant (and you couldn't have known without reading my mind) "in my municipality", where I'm on the board that manages the ISP contracts and have some knowledge that normal people in fact actually like Comcast fine, are not especially interested in having a bunch of new choices. But we also have AT&T.

Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome. I used to be ok with comcast even with their incessant increasing of rates that i'd have to negotiate and the terrible service. Finally had enough, switched to AT&T fiber. omg. the difference is night and day. No more caps, no more random outages. Lower pings, half the price and no price increase so far. I don't know why anybody keeps it tbh

While I hate it, I agree with you. My in laws are my non-tech bellwether.

They use Comcast, and love it. It's zero maintenance, comes bundled with their cable, and provides in person customer support for almost any problem at all at no cost.

They're paying more than they should for slow speeds. But they don't care about that. They don't know technology, and their connection plays YouTube and Facebook.

> But we also have AT&T

That might be part of it. When I first moved in, Comcast was the only ISP available. Then the city got municipal fibre. Suddenly, comcast decided to lower prices, and increase speeds. I will say that it was still a pain to cancel my subscription when I switched to the new setvice, though.

The underlying technology not the company itself is good enough most people don’t really complain once everything is set up. But for people moving to or from different areas Comcast really comes off much worse than most ISPs.

You can notice differences in web browsing above and beyond what the highly gamed “speed tests” suggest. Wait times for a technician are somewhat region dependent, but it’s never great etc. Total prices are high even when they have some competition and get silly when they’re a monopoly.

My parents are hitting and exceeding their 1.2TiB data allotment streaming TV shows. I'm considering setting them up with T-Mobile home internet.

Data caps alone are extremely anti consumer friendly. It's very difficult for non technical folks to understand how much they're consuming. Especially given the stark different between 1080p and 4k which might not even be obvious depending on their TV and streaming service.

Bingo. You really need to take HN thoughts (or really any nerd haven) with a grain of salt when it comes to _anything_ tech. Lots of strong (often informed) opinions that grounded in a reality that does not exist for most people.

There is competition in my area and I stay on it. Just as a counter anecdote.

There is competition in my area and it is way faster, and I did switch

But the competition isn't great either, so I get why people don't.

The modem/router the other company uses (can't use my own modem) is terrible and their support had no idea what I was talking about when I pointed to the DHCP table full of random shit that it wasn't freeing up, and logs full of DNS errors. And the wifi access points they provided were terrible too (free, but terrible). Eventually I worked around that by just adding my own router in the mix with a (internal 192.168) static IP, cut their DNS out of my router's list of DNS, and used my own wifi access points (which I had from Comcast days).

After my third support call I got a tech who provided instructions on putting their router/modem combo into bridge mode, but I'm hesitant to actually go through with that because I have no confidence their support can unwind me if anything goes wrong.

Like sibling points out, Comcast does offer faster download speed due to the competition. Still not as fast, but w/e.

The service you receive is made better just by the presence of competition.

It was interesting to see one of the commenters mention Fort Collins Connexion.

I've mentioned them a few times on HN with lots of other locals chiming in, but that service was incredible. I was very sad when I moved to an older apartment complex that refused to allow the buildup and had to go back to Comcast for a year before I moved away. Comcast offered 1.2Gb/s down, which was real, but the second anyone did a small upload, the entire network bogged down to actually unusable speeds (read: HN wouldn't load at all).

Cheaper and significantly better service from the municipal ISP than mega-corp.

That sounds like bufferbloat[1]. You can usually address that by using a router that supports active queue management, but it's a little esoteric. Newer versions of DOCSIS also specify support for simple active queue management on the modem, and I think this has become a little bit better in recent years. I used to have Comcast/Xfinity service and they didn't do terribly with regard to bufferbloat. They didn't do well, either, but it used to be much worse.

Some of the cable ISPs also have such asymmetric service that you can use most of the upload bandwidth just with ACKs while downloading. They often use ACK suppression to reduce the number ACKs and use the link more efficiently.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Comcast is supposedly rolling out mid split to boost upload. Spectrum has already rolled out high split in some markets

Cox tried to switch me to $100/mo for absolutely no reason. Same plan, etc.

Another provider had recently entered my neighborhood taking my choices from 1 to 2. I threatened to switch and they kept me at $50/mo.

Monopolies are bogus.

I'm very unhappy with the only ISP option I have in my apartment. I'll get (physical) spam from other ISPs that don't even offer service in my building, and around once a year I check a ton of common ISPs to see if they've added service to my building, but they never have. Meanwhile, every few months there will randomly be outages in the middle of the day for a few hours, but they always claim after the fact that the outage was shorter than it actually was so I don't qualify for any refund. The one time I tried to chat with their customer service they lied to me about it and then somehow the message asking me "is there anything else I can help with?" didn't show up until several minutes after the timestamp that it showed, by which point it came with a follow-up saying they were closing the chat due to a lack of response.

Maybe your building has an exclusive contract with the only ISP available.

That was the case with our last apartment. There was AT&T fiber running in front and the building was wired with cat5e. I can almost guarantee there was an AT&T fiber ran to a wiring closet somewhere but Spectrum (cable) had an exclusive servicing contract.

i had the same experience with fios over webchat with a customer service rep-- told them the price increase was too much for me and if there were no other options i'd have to go back to spectrum and they immediately opened up with my original rate again

Sadly, I just threaten to switch to a non-existent provider and they reduce my rate. It's humiliating that that has to happen at all, not empowering.

One thing I like about the UK is the concept of regulated competition. The purpose is to ensure that there is always a competitive market place - so for instance in Internet technology, wholesale provider provides DSL layer 1/2 to multiple ISPs, who provide the PPPoA/E termination and value added services (e.g. email). There is often other technology available to the same addresses - cable, FTTP. The result is that for most addresses there is a choice of about 200 ISPs. The one I use (Andrews and Arnold) is expensive, but I have a /28 and a /48, I can run servers, the line is monitored once every second using their custom-build hardware, and I've had them ring me to say there is a fault on the line which will be cleared within half an hour. Also they implement the Shibboleet protocol. I pay for this, and for most consumers it would not be worthwhile - but that's the point. There is genuine competition with real differentiation between ISPs.

Small fibre companies have also been allowed to use Open Reach ducts and telegraph poles to speed up the fibre roll out. This has meant I've been able to get FTTP before Open Reach had brought it to my village.

I see that A&A have finally started offering uncapped data plans since August, good on them, since that originally put me off and I never signed up with them despite all the praise they get on HN

I've been a customer of A&A for a few years - I had the same reticence at first but thought I'd try them anyway. The only time I've come close to the 1TB monthly usage quota is this month, entirely because (for work) I had to download a very large number of docker images, in addition to a normal usage of 500-750GB. I think it helps that some unused portion of the usage quota gets rolled over too. Out of curiosity, what are you doing that would make you regularly exceed 1TB?

I don't think I'm doing anything crazy, the odd game from steam, some ML models from huggingface, running a Plex server for myself and friends/family. I checked my usage and regularly exceed 1TB every month, so that's why I was put off.

I've been lucky that a new ISP came to my area and I can avoid Openreach infrastructure completely, they've put a FTTH line directly into my house and offer up to 8Gbps symmetrical

Kinda rich that the guy that thinks we don't need next-gen image formats because "bandwidth is cheap in most places" is making purchasing decisions around bandwidth being expensive.

I don't switch my ISP because of their excellent customer service, instead I keep them because I have no idea how good their customer service is. When you need to know how good a company's customer service is that means the company has already failed at some level in the delivery.

Exactly my thoughts. I've never had to get into contact with my ISP. If it works it works.

The best feature Comcast has added in recent years is the ability to request a $5 bill credit each time there's an outage. I use it more months than not. I suppose that's good customer service although it'd be better if it wasn't needed.

How recent is that? More than a decade ago, my friend related to me how his grandmother was subscribed to cable TV through comcast, but one channel wasn't working.

And every day, she'd call them to complain about the one channel that didn't work, and they'd apply a minor credit to her bill.

As far as I'm aware the "self-service" version of it on their website is in the past year. I think you're right that it's been possible over the phone for a long time though.

AT&T took gov money to lay fiber years ago and never lit it up.

Centurylink will only offer me 6Mbps DSL.

A few years ago my electric coop spun up a for profit ISP and ran fiber to all their customers and provides reliable service and decent speeds.

Customer service has nothing to do with it.

Coop fiber is the best.

When I had a single ISP, I hated them for the downtime. I switched ISPs and also felt the same, for the same reason, of the new one. Now I have two ISPs, and because their respective occasional outages haven't overlapped, I'm generally fine with both, even though they've each continued to have outages. Not noticing outages has made all the difference.

No, it is because there is literally nothing to switch to. The costs of infrastructure are too great to have real competition. And on top of that they also sue anyone who tries.

They are parasites. Other countries have fast internet at reasonable prices without weird data caps.

I hope they get regulated and forced to lease out the "last mile" at cost. I'd like them to get eminent domained for stealing taxpayer money on lies that they would build infrastructure. Unfortunately we are instead looking at four years of deregulation. A huge gift to these massive assholes.

There's more to running a good ISP than support. Good service is a bigger driver than customer service. And expectation management is a total lifecycle thing, if you let customers set their own expectations then the service is probably trash by default and your customer support staff will get the blame.

The solutions I see are 2 fold.

1. ISP gets completely involved in your home network, any kind of point of demarcation is completely scrapped in favour of optimising your home wifi.

2. ISP provides the best service they possibly can within reason, has good expectation management and is very firm with their demarc.

3. large scale provider with some kind of physical or regulated monopoly and the end users can smoke meat cigars.

1 has very diminishing returns. If you have 300 subscribers and only 5 of them are on dodgy links, you can get very involved with your customers network issues. But this doesnt scale, and when you try to scale you have left customers with all sorts of expectations. Its hard to package too, because theres a push to end call out fees. If you are rolling truck for "Why facebook slow" it can literally end your business.

Lots of ISPs (at least the Bell and Telus rebrands) are now doing remote-managed “home hubs” with integrated wifi that can be remote managed by the ISP. This solves the call-out problem and also fixes user expectations — and they’re leased not sold, so they can actually be good wifi devices.

I don’t personally use them, because “ISP managed wifi” sounds like a bad idea to me, but I can see the value to people who can’t distinguish the above two terms.

Assuming the ISPs equipment works correctly. AT&T fiber in the U.S. has apparently had issues for months with a few patches to stabilize things.

My Tp-Link Omada AP has better coverage and speed. I setup my parents up with edgerouterx and Tp-Link AP and it's been hands off for the last 1+ years.

If ISPs can actually offer decent equipment I think it's a win but that seems like more the exception than norm. Reasonably priced prosumer and small business equipment has been way more stable in my experience.

Yeah I worked with one of those, a few months after I stopped playing with it, the company dropped the product entirely. Considering it could only be managed through their portal I saw lots of teeth gnashing from providers who had significant numbers in production.

> but I can see the value to people who can’t distinguish the above two terms.

The issue is that you have both as customers. And having multiple packages with different price points can cause headaches.

You really need "Bad customer brand" with phat packages for people who cant use tech and "good customer brand" that offers a good service with little to no support. And keep them separate as possible.

As long as it's optional and they still allow BYOD it's a good solution for some customers.

BYOD barely existed for cable (since DOCSIS specifies ISP remote management as part of the spec) and doesn’t exist at all for fiber. If you mean your own router: yeah, I do that, they don’t support it but there’s no real way to stop me? I do end up double-NAT’d but my real router is DMZ’d so there’s no practical issue… until they start issuing IPv6.

The problem with "ISP gets into your home network" is that that locks the user out of a lot of important diagnostic tools on the router. I can't even view what kind of configuration it has.

It's true. When I was in jail I also stayed because of the excellent wardens!

If I have to interact with your customer service, I’m already thinking about cancelling. Your net promoter scores are worthless.

In Canada, the large telcos are being regulated by the CRTC (Canada's FCC) and one recent regulation is forcing them to sell wholesale access to their fiber networks to smaller competitors. You think this would be a good thing, but the CRTC wholesale rates in that regulation are higher than what the big telcos are directly charging to their customers, which makes the smaller competitors unable to compete on price.

I've been shopping around these small providers, and a lot of them have recently been acquired by the big telcos.

Comcast has to be supplying their people with bulk lots of experimental aerospace-grade ganga if they can say this without immediately bursting into laughter.

I'm sorry, if that were me the ganga would make me more likely to break up, not less

I assume they just hire sociopaths for this sort of PR role. That way the employees will have no issues with lying through their teeth, and the company doesn't need to spend money on weed.

I went to return an old modem to Spectrum in the Central Coast, CA a few weeks ago. I showed up to the store with it all packed up nice and ready to go. Employees there directed me to a tablet on a stand at the entrance and told me to enter my name into the waiting list. I told them I was just dropping off the box. Nope. gotta sign in.

Ok... one hour later they finally call me up (I have my infant baby in a stroller with me, luckily she didn't get fussy). Dude literally scanned the box with a barcode scanner, said thank you, and sent me on my way. Took less than 30 seconds. It was hard not to interpret this is an ISP power move. If I could go anywhere else I would.

When I turned in a modem and set-top box to Comcast, they just chucked it into a bin behind the desk and said that was it. No scanning or otherwise recording any of it. I demanded they fish it all back out so they could write me up a receipt, because I don't trust those bastards to claim I never returned that stuff.

To the workers credit, he did do that. Albeit with an incredible eyeroll.

I had this happen with Verizon, I insisted on a receipt, which they handwrote for me. Then they told me I never returned the device and charged me!

Couldn't get through to anyone, no replies. I refused to pay. They sent it to debt collection, no matter how many times I sent the picture of the receipt they refused to take it.

Took me 2 years to get it off my credit report, including sending multiple letters via certified mail. Caused my credit to go down by 100 until it finally disappeared and went back to normal.

They. Are. The. Worst.

This sounds like a case where consulting a lawyer might actually be useful…

It could be, but you're not going to get into a situation where you recover attorney's fees.

So you're in a position where you can either handle it yourself and grind it out, or you can pay a lawyer an indeterminate amount to fix it-- probably just enough for a letter, but that may not even do the trick.

Suing in small claims is an option, though. You might recover something, and you'll certainly cause Verizon to incur expenses.

They allow e-check in... Except for equipment return...

At least they print a receipt with the unit MAC/serial as proof it's been returned.

We named our first child after our ISP, their customer service was that good

Here in Australia I've found (so far) only one ISP that's actually really, really good with good customer service: https://www.launtel.net.au

They have super high review scores for good reason. :)

https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/launtel

Most other ISPs over here are the same kind of crap that you see in the article. Lots of PR and weasel words with crap service, support, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. Ugh.

Well, the US doesn't seem to have race-to-the-bottom pricing, but all the other bits apply.

---

Note that I've only used Launtel for residential internet, not business grade service. No idea how they are for business stuff.

I recognize that the title is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one individual for which it's genuinely true. Sonic[0] has the best customer service of any company ever encountered, and it's not even close. The few times I've had to contact them for assistance, I've been very quickly connected with someone clearly _very_ technical who was able to grok my problem immediately and give clear, cogent, respectful debugging advice and perspective. I do not exaggerate when I say I would gladly pay double their current rate just for the peace of mind of knowing that I can depend on them if I ever need their support again. Not that I often do, because their baseline connectivity/speed is also great.

...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.

[0] https://www.sonic.com

I want to talk to my ISPs customer service about as much as I want to talk to my municipal water supply’s customer service. Just work, damn it.

I previously had on of the major ISPs in my State/Region and it was aweful, they suck. Then a relatively new company came in and I switched and it was finally fiber and cable and it is amazing. Its not perfect these are companies at the end of the day. But if it weren't for this new company I would be forced by no competion not because of the service of the ISP.

I don't switch providers because thanks to the Liberal Party of Australia choosing copper phone lines instead of fibre for the NBN, no matter which provider I choose I'm stuck with 25mbps that doesn't work at all when it's raining.

Details don't matter much when no matter what that's the best you can ever get, enforced by law.

I mean, if we were still on the fibre rollout you might still be waiting for fibre anyway.

Are you sure you have no alternatives? NSW has a few ok to good wireless providers.

That must be why they all lobby against municipal wifi. They must know the service would be better, so we'd all switch.

For me its really simple: an ISP is a utility. As long as the connection works I don't even think about it. Why go through the hassle of changing it? Have to change modems and all that stuff. I've extended my contract for another 2 years because I have no complaints.

The one time I considered cancelling my current provider (Comcast where I have gigabit), I found the alternative was CenturyLink with 20 Mbps.

As if to rub salt in the wound, Comcast then upgraded me to 2000 Mbps which I can't even use with my current hardware.

Spectrum used to have a monopoly in my area, so I was stuck with their 15mbps speeds and constant outages. When Google Fiber became available here, I immediately subscribed to it (it was significantly cheaper for gigabit speeds).

As soon as the fiber was set up, I called Spectrum to cancel my account, and after being bounced around between a couple support people, I was finally transferred to retention where I could have my account properly closed. Except instead of a person, I got a machine telling me that the department was closed for the day, and I should call back Monday (this wasn't even late on a weekend, it was midday Friday).

I called back to ask what was wrong and why I was transferred to an empty department, and the support rep told me the last rep should have known and shouldn't have transferred me there, but I would indeed need to wait until Monday. Fine.

Monday I call back, get through the layers of reps, and am finally told that they're having an internal outage and won't be able to cancel my account, but they assured me that if I incur any additional charges on my bill because of the delay, they'll be happy to remove them.

I don't know how long this "outage" is going to last, so I wait a couple days and call back again, very quickly get transferred to where I need to be, and with no pushback or excuses whatsoever get told my account is now cancelled and my bill is all settled up, and to have a good day. Great. I cancel the virtual credit card I used to pay them, since I no longer need it.

A month later I get a text from Spectrum telling me they aren't able to bill me, and my service will be interrupted if I don't pay this new bill. I call and support tells me that my account is cancelled, I owe nothing, and to ignore the text. I do make some efforts to verify that the text is actually from Spectrum, and it does seem to be. No indications of a spammer impersonating Spectrum.

The next month it happens again, and this time when I call I'm told my account is not cancelled and my service has been suspended because I now owe a couple months of payment plus late fees, and they won't be able to cancel my account until I pay those. They have no record of me cancelling my account, and unfortunately the manager who has the authority to waive the late fees is out today. I'm offered the opportunity to pay the full amount of bogus charges, and wished a good day when I decline.

Every month since then they've texted me to let me know that another payment for the month hasn't gone through. Lately the texts have started saying that they will be sent to collections. Part of me hopes they take me to court over it.

I think if you asked Spectrum, they would tell you that I'm still a customer of theirs, and that I'm sticking with them because of their excellent customer service.

full of lies. for example, in downtown SF the options are few and far between.

there is comcast for high speed, and well… there is comcast.

If you want slow bonded DSL you can go to Sonic. Or At&T.

Only recently has LTE become fast enough to make home Internet over LTE an acceptable alternative

They are just equally bad at customer service that most people don't even bother.

Helsinki offers a choice of ISPs thruout the metro area. So obv no one individual ISP laid all that cabling. I'm not sure how it was all organised & financed. Maybe someone who knows more can comment. Olkaa hyvä.

You should see the mess we have in Australia. I think most people churn every 6 months as every ISP does the same stupid 30% off for first 6 months deal.

It's all the same national network so there's very little difference between ISPs.

It has more to do with the cost of accessing that network.

Bevan Slattery used to do a yearly Commsday presentation where he would tear the NBN economics up live on stage. Basically after getting the service from NBN to the provider, theres basically nothing left over for the provider to use for support, transit, peering, hardware whatever.

If someone had a stable low price they'd just keep customers for longer.

I can't imagine high churn helps anyone.

North Korea says their excellent Human rights is reason for low emigration rate.

This reminded me of South Park’s take on cable companies. NSFW, it’s South Park.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk

My ISP (Spectrum business, not even the consumer end) can't even get me logged in to my account so I can manage my service. Multiple calls, same results.

And they keep jacking up the price too. Astound, here I come!

Astound seems to be some PE buying up local ISPs and it's probably very different depending on which ISP is Astound in your area, but having service from a local ISP before and after it was acquired by Astound I could not help but notice severe degradation of the service (which was not stellar to begin with but cheap enough and local). Frequent price increases (every 2-3 months) were some of the Astound's "improvements" to the old service.

Astound has worked really hard to lose my business, I moved to Comcast not too long ago. Astound also now stiffs you for the full billing month when you cancel, FYI, so if you make the mistake of switching away from Astound two days into your billing cycle, they'll try to collect the other 28 days as pure profit.

>Astound has worked really hard to lose my business, I moved to Comcast not too long ago. Astound also now stiffs you for the full billing month when you cancel, FYI, so if you make the mistake of switching away from Astound two days into your billing cycle, they'll try to collect the other 28 days as pure profit.

Thanks. That's good to know. Sadly, Spectrum and Astound are the only two ISPs in my apartment building. Despite Verizon putting cell towers on the roof and repeated requests (not to mention having it in other buildings on my street), they have not made FIOS available to me and the other residents of my buiilding.

Sigh.

Excellent customer service for an ISP is no service. Your internet speeds don’t deviate I don’t call you. Otherwise I go for the lowest price and if your agree to a low price, your customer service is good.

This could be easily summed up with a public poll with one question, "Would you switch ISP if you had a better option?"

My thought is somewhere around 98% would say yes, if not 99 and some points.

What does this not apply to? Would you have picked a different option if you had a better option?

That’s not the question, though - it’s would they switch. Switching has significant friction, at least in people’s minds. You probably wouldn’t switch from ISP1 at $30/mo to ISP2 at $29.95/mo (with the same service) unless you’re irritated with ISP1 for other reasons. You might have chosen ISP2 if you were starting from scratch, though.

So what does "better option" imply?

Better enough to overcome the switching cost.

So you agree the question is meaningless. If “better” means “better enough to overcome the switching cost”, then the answer to “would you switch ISP if you had a better option?” would by definition always be yes.

When last I had checked, Comcast had a lower customer approval rating than United Airlines. You know, the punch-a-doctor-in-the-face, drag-him-off-the-flight folks.

In my case, Comcast has a city government-granted monopoly to provide broadband, so they are my only choice (without going to a WISP/Starlink)

Exclusive municipal franchise agreements have been prohibited since the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992.

Your city cannot unreasonably refuse to grant a franchise to another operator, in the unlikely event another operator would like to provide a similar service. These things used to be a government-granted monopoly, but IMHO, the continuing lack of competition stems from market realities.

Building a new network in a city that's already covered adequately is hard to justify economically, because switching is a pain, and most of the market can't really tell the difference between providers; and even if you do start to attract customers, the competitor's network likely gets better as you relieve their bottlenecks.

Targeting only the areas of the city that aren't well served is likely to not be economically viable either. For one thing, the franchise agreement might have a minimum coverage percent. For another, there are probably reasons the other network doesn't cover those areas; some of which may still apply.

And there's the elephant in the room, the incumbent presumably has enough revenue from other areas that they can cross-subsidize network updates and build out to compete where you are. In some ways, this was Google Fiber's market strategy: Google Fiber's corporate goal was to get more people connected at high speeds so that they could load higher quality ads on YouTube and other Google properties. Building out fiber in the Kansas Cities was a way to meet that goal in those cities, but it was a lot of work. By announcing planned cities in early 2014 [1], Google was able to induce incumbents to improve their networks in those cities, reaching their goal before any Google Fiber permits were approved in those cities; then they could wrap it up and end all expansion works. :P

[1] https://blog.google/alphabet/exploring-new-cities-for-google...

Which city?

The funny thing is that telco customer service is in fact orders of magnitude better than it was in the monopoly days. Ma Bell was ruthless.

Lack of competition is the answer. There is only 1 provider that can give me 1g or more. ISPs are out of touch.

Exactly. Few ISP's offer fiber.

Very few ISP's will offer data center speeds.

I am yet to find an ISP that offers over 5gig or for an affordable price.

There's plenty of ISPs that offer over 5gig for an affordable price. You just need to live in a datacenter near an internet exchange. :)

I only have one real option even nearby a high population density area, Comcast.

Goebbels never told lies that big!

Edit: but likely they learned his techniques.

Black is white, weak is strong, ISPs have great customer service.

I laughed out loud at this. Thanks for the laugh.

they’re right, that’s why I switched to tmobile when my old job stopped paying for internet.

I would get dialup before paying any money to comcast

North Korea has elections too!

My 70 year old mom who lives alone and whose only company is really her TV went nearly 5 weeks without tv or internet when some construction cut the line (or something near her place). Who is her provider? Comcast. Why did it take so long? Anybody’s guess. But was the customer service so amazing? No. Hahah. No. They’re just the only game in town. Monopolies suck for this reason.

What other providers?

Hahahahahaha

Yeah, because every time I call they give me a new "deal" and lower my bill by $10 a month.

> The lobby groups' description may surprise the many Internet users suffering from little competition and poor customer service ...

Starlink is the best internet service I've ever had, so I'm able to restrain my tears for the poor suffering users who only have that alternative.

Starlink is extremely variable. Its hard to overstate how little your satisfaction with the service is representative. I have had Starlink under 10/10 with frequent dropouts, and over the rated maximum capacity depending on geographical location.

Starlink is 2x per month as my ATT fiber account. Can't compare speeds since Starlink's website doesn't show speeds with monthly pricing. I doubt it's 2x the speed

I just speed tested my Starlink connection at 93 Mpbs down, 9.3 Mpbs up. That's slower than usual but better than 10x the speed I was getting from a rural telco, and it has been more reliable too, for about the same price.

What am I missing out on from a faster connection?

I get 1gbps up/down for ~$74/month. So Starlink is 1.7x for much less speed.

The only way Starlink looks attractive to me is if living off the grid and its the only option. By the time I'm no longer paying for utilities, the increased for less performance will not be as expensive. That's not happening any time soon

I looked at the Starlink website and it looks like residential service is $120/mo. I pay less than that ($110/mo) for 1 Gbps down and 40 Mbps up from Comcast. They also give me a public v4 IP, not CGNAT like Starlink. My service is quite reliable (I would say I have a few hours' downtime once every year or two), so that part is a wash. The one advantage Starlink has is they offer a /56 to IPv6 customers, not just a /60 that Comcast does.

Obviously it varies significantly based on where you are. Different ISPs are different, and even the same provider might be good in one region and bad in another. But for me at least, Starlink would be a terrible choice. They are worse in most every way (sometimes significantly so), and only better in one way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com