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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?

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My experience from almost a decade ago, mostly in DSL land, is that most customer calls were "my WiFi doesn't reach through the solid steel wall the router is hung against" and "how do I set up my email" and maybe "I lost the password to my WiFi again". WiFi issues were especially bad when 802.11n got finalised but there were tons of "draft n" WiFi devices out there that almost followed the WiFi spec. I still shudder when I see Atheros listed in device manager.

There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters.

I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves.

Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.

I quite enjoyed "I run a massive home business and require 24/7 uptime and will get extremely aggressive about this"

"Maam, if your business is that important, surely you as a responsible business owner have gone and purchased a business class internet service with 24/7 SLA. It says here, you are on our cheapest, residential VDSL service"

Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at least, their support is capable of fully managing your router and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve direct customer needs such as a non-optional guest WiFi access point that any other comcast user can use).

This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)

> This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes

For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.

Comcast killed my Internet during an interview video call.

Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.

Exactly. That's the kind of logic that only makes sense in a metastasized corpo. The only times my non-incumbent fiber connection has gone down in 8 years have been overnight maintenance windows that only happen maybe a few times per year.

Comcast said they couldn't offer me another credit because I'd had too many outage credits in the previous month.

I don't really want any outage credits.

The guest wifi - Xfinity WiFi - can be disabled.

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...

Last I checked (years ago) it turned itself back on any time the router was power cycled.

I know for a while (I switched back to consumer a few years ago) Comcast Business let you persistently opt out, but if you opted out, you couldn't use other people's APs (either "share and get access to that network" or "don't share, and don't").

Now I just use my own customer modem.

> proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes

I usually speedrun this by telling them something like: I am hardwired to the modem and seeing T4s in the log.

> Great. Glad to hear you are connected via hard wire Mr. teeray.

> Please wait a moment while I check on some things on your account.

> Thank you for your patience. Can you please confirm for me that you see a green light on the top of the device? Can you tell me whether the light is blinking or is solid?

If only 'shibboleet' had caught on -.-

https://xkcd.com/806/

Back when Comcast made it absolutely mandatory to have a technician come to the house to do the install, I just chatted with the tech about computer networking and our respective home setups. This usually got me the phone number for the local tech support office along with a "Call this if the service is giving you any real issues.".

This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset. These might have been the majority of cases.

other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers.

I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.

Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32 million customers, that means you might get tens of thousands of calls about it.

But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.

I once spent half an hour on the phone with a dialup customer who couldn't get connected. Fortunately, they fixed their own problem - they had been entering the "letter zero" instead of the "number zero" (their words.)

Took another call from an irate dialup customer who demanded a refund - he didn't know he needed a computer to use the internet -- and had driven himself mad dialing up our modem bank with his telephone and waiting for the training tones to subside so he could begin to navigate the internet as he imagined it to work: press 1 for email, 2 for news, 3 for weather...

Despite the proliferation of smart phones and greater prevalence of home networks, I don't think the situation has changed much for a segment of the population once you get down to troubleshooting why something isn't working. The skills and the willingness to just try to fix the problem aren't there.

ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?

Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.

Nice analogy!

This, and also, it's much more common for internet problems to be caused by upstream issues not in the house (partly because of the situation you describe....not much to go wrong on the users end). It's very rare that a plumbing problem is because the main water line lost pressure.

Back when I still had ISPs that provided the modem + router, every single issue I think I ever had fell into one of two categories: a modem and/or router power cycle fixed it, or it was a broader network issue that had nothing to do with me or my particular internet situation (this is omitting the most common third issue: terrible customer service problems, but that's a separate thing)

Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever they have an existing business relationship with for issues related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it isn't illogical.

Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.

After fixing internet for some neighbors and older relatives, I've wondered if people would pay for a home network / internet handyman service. It's super frustrating, especially for older folks. They often confuse their email passwords, ISP passwords, wifi setup, etc. Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP.

I had the same thought, and even took on a few "customers" (local folks I didn't charge, but used as a test group). If I decide to do it "for real" I will definitely need to build a relationship with a person who can run ethernet cables through walls for people. I can do that, but the time it would take would not make it worth it for me.

  Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP.

If you want a landline to call emergency services, I'd expect a real landline will have higher uptime than one that depends on your router.

VoIP doesn't necessarily require your router to be up.

For example, if you subscribe to Verizon FiOS voice, the technician will disconnect your copper phone lines and connect them to VoIP termination on your ONT.

This is true, but it's not just that. How many useless cable TV packages are people paying for, on top of Netflix, Hulu, and tons of other streaming services?

> After fixing internet for some neighbors and older relatives, I've wondered if people would pay for a home network / internet handyman service.

That's what I did for pocket as a kid in high school (in the mid-2000s).

For the same reason you called the phone company when your phone went out, not a phone plumber.

I don’t understand what you mean. If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP.

You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work.

The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.

> If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP.

In the US, most do. This is a standard part of "in home installation" when first subscribing to service for all of the major providers in the US.

Example: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/sc...

There are times when you're better off calling the local sewer department first.

In San Jose, if you see evidence that your house's main drain has backed up and you have a cleanout within 5' of the sidewalk, you're better off calling the city first before calling a plumber -- the sewer department will snake the "lateral" pipe between the cleanout and the main sewer line under the street for free.

The one time we used this the response time was very quick (in line with the 30 minute response time they cite on their website).

It's called the Geek Squad AFAIK. But most people have no understanding of how their home network works so they don't know how to decide who to call.

Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels. Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes. Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT.

With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.

Right now device manufacturers are capturing the sliver of the market that actually cares about having fast Wi-Fi. A few ISPs have partnered with these manufacturers through the time honored business model of charging $10-20/mo forever on a box that costs $200.

My electricity and water is much more reliable than my Internet service. Then again, I've never called my ISP about an issue that wasn't 100% on them, but the HN crowd is more exceptional in that sense than most people.

In my experience with small ISP's they make 99% of their own headaches, the last 1% being provided by the small consultants who work with small ISP.

For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options.

I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre.

70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related.

They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade.

Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.

I'd imagine it's a lot less than "Okay, let's start by going into your dialer settings..."

With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out.

On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on.

Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...

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