A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
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Tip to anyone reading this: After I cancelled and closed my account, they billed me one last time for double my monthly bill ($200). No idea why, probably they thought they'd try to get away with it. I had little to no interest in participating in their customer support circus again, so I just went online to my bank and submitted a dispute of the charge. The bank instantly ruled in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast chargebacks to do that.
I also submitted a complaint to the AG office and my local commission but I'm not expecting anything to happen.
Since then, I have moved to Austin, where there are two large Internet Service Providers competing against each other. I mostly use Spectrum; it is not perfect, people here complain about it, but it is incomparably better than Comcast.
I did the same thing, except I disputed a collections record on my Credit Report from either AT&T or Comcast. They also ruled in my favor quickly, and I was quite surprised that it wasn't a more difficult process.
They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
Nailing dense questions about network infrastructure? You get to the engineering team.
Failing to know what the "G" in 2.4GHz means? You probably just need someone to tell you to restart your router.
>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).
I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.
I am very fortunate to have two competing ISPs in my area. Verizon Fios, and Optimum Fibre. I have played them against each other. I have had both, over the years. I am currently using Optimum.
Still not especially cheap, but the service is good. The customer service ... not so good (think South Park).
I do suggest using high voltage rather than a hammer.
hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm springs.
It is a common problem with DOCSIS! And has been the case since 1.0 era. DO NOT use Cable if you can.
It happens when it is over subscribed, as well as other radio interference. Although common cause is over subscription. You may actually try downgrading your speed / DOCSIS 2.0 / 3.0 to see if it helps.
Funny enough with G.Fast, had they continue the investment running 1Gbps on telephone cable would have still been better than DOCSIS.
I used to fight this before I got my fibre optic. Even 5G Internet is better than DOCSIS. For people who have never been through this, you will quickly learn the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.
I dont know about US, but in most places on earth Government seems to be ok to mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well. And it seems most property agency refuse to put internet connection speed and types on the property pages. If consumer could easily learn without optical fibre equals shitty property and refuse to buy or rent the land lord will have interest to quickly act upon it.
Electricity and water was mandated at the time the government mostly did right by the people and wasn't yet (fully) captured by corporate interests. By the time the internet arrived this was no longer the case.
No. Water and electricity were not mandated in a magical past where the government was awesome. The government has been captured by corporations and special interests forever. The level of corruption in the 1800s was astronomical compared to today.
People fought for those rights. Often literally. And they still don't exist in some places.
Arkansas just passed a law that you need a working roof, electricity, heat and water, in 2021.
So no. Sitting around lamenting a past that never existed won't get us anywhere.
I complained regularly, and always had "techs" come out. They would usually claim it was my splitter or my modem. I suggested they go outside and test the line from the street. They'd then confirm the loss was present on the line outside, then escalate it to the "outside guys" (plant or whatever.) It would be fixed for a month or two, then come back.
Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood. Cable is NOT reliable.
Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.
So anyway, outside that lucky group we all use cable only because the alternative is, in many places, 6Mbps ADSL on aging and flaky copper wires. Or potentially 12Mbps… VDSL? AT&T branded that as U-Verse for a while. But basically they ceded the market to the cable companies.
AT&T is allergic to capex and even if they changed their mind recently they waited an unforgivably long time (20 years!) to start. They and their predecessors were happy to take all those sweet subsidies for doing so in the 90s though.
The incumbents have been lobbying against this heavily, winning state laws banning municipalities from setting up their own fiber in some places.
The second sentence answers the question.
> It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.
You assume that your network provider wants to provide "reliable, speedy network connectivity" and not "maximize profits with the smallest possible outlay".
Given they already have a bunch 'legacy' infrastructure, they're going to try to milk that existing plant as much as possible before shelling out another dime on anything new. That is not a recipe for "reliable, speedy network connectivity".
Fiber is good for this because it's both cheap and effectively future proof vs consumer needs. Also, thanks to how IP works, a municipality can build out the physical network, then offer competitive options among ISPs delivering service on it if they like.
This generally results in much better service for consumers at lower cost, which is why Comcast, Century Link, etc, have been doing all the political maneuvering they can to pre-empt voters from choosing that path.
Please don't assume everyone's usecase is the same as yours. I would pay dearly to have an unreliable but FAST connection just to get away from my 6Mbps DSL.
The issue is that the ISP selling services beyond what that physical network segment can provide, and it being effectively legal to sell something and not deliver it if you're a big enough corporation and only scam consumers.
T-Mobile (both TMHI and Calyx Sprout SIM) has 40-75 Mbps uploads versus 20-35 on Spectrum.
It also helps that I use a L2TP VPN to a BGP VPS to get myself a public IPv4, otherwise I'd have Spectrum for no CGNAT.
Yes, I'd much rather have fiber with symmetrical speeds and low latency. Heck, if Spectrum had high split or even mid split I'd have that.
Cable hyped their "10G" upgrades but it's basically vaporware while non-cable ISPs actually showed up with fiber and/or 5G. Trump's tariffs are also punishing cable ISPs.
Sure, they might be a short (<1h) outage once or twice per year, but even fiber infrastructure is not immune to this.
Yeah, they will eventually bring fiber to the apartment. This is Germany anyhow, it will happen in the next 10-30 years.
Lobbying by big ISPs.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.
The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.
Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.
I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.
I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.
I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.
Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.
They do so with exactly no fuss.
I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.
In the USA, what is this, precisely?
CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".
After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.
An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive compound) might not think it’s worth coming out and marking their fiber lines when you call the city’s 811 number to mark utilities before digging for a project, like a fence.
If that fence ends up cutting the fiber line when digging a post, the company installing the fence can submit a ticket through a different portal than you as an actual residential customer of the ISP can, and that ticket probably gets responded to well before your attempts to contact them and request a call back because they are always experiencing a high volume of calls.
They’ll never admit any negligence on their part for refusing to mark utility lines, and you just have to remember where they buried the new ones, if they ever came back out to bury them instead of just leaving them aboive ground and flailing around.
Sometimes they even try to charge you for fixing the fiber line.
But they do care about their monopoly (if they have a legal one). My approach is now to get the municipal monopoly contract void since they claim my home is "available" but they've been saying that for over four years now. They have the requirement to connect everyone within reasonable time. (note: not in the US but the same issues apply elsewhere as well).
Hah, we were independent and now part of a megacorp. The local ISP (basically a Optimum subsidiary) still does not care. Their ONT is still a old model that uses....volatile RAM for configuration, and if (and they do) fail to replace the backup batteries, then the configuration is wiped on power interruptions.
The upstream channels are squarely in the HF to VHF range. The downstream channels (which typically require more bandwidth) start at about the same HF frequency (42MHz) but can extend above 1GHz. Each channel, however, is relatively bandwidth limited.
I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible, I connected the oscilloscope to see what the signals looked like. And, because, why not. I had driven 2+ hours to get there, might as well try everything! I didn't expect it to actually be able to decode the signals. I was surprised to find a correlation between the modem losing sync and a visually-distinct pattern appearing on the scope though.
Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith effort to resolve it with them beforehand.
What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they have no reason to bother actually even providing the service. Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money providing you with a service) to it being their problem (they now need to convince you to give them money).
Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden, and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of when you will need to do this again, not if).
1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.
2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.
3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble
I've done it; both are true and yet not the end of the world:
Disconnect the service: this is obvious, but if you're doing this because the service is not usable and you are switching to another provider anyway, so good riddance? Best case scenario they magically fix the problem, worst-case no change.
Collections: yes, they called, I provided evidence of my communication with the provider trying to resolve it in good faith. Never heard back since and it's been 6 years.
Collections agencies have a business to run and focus on collecting valid debt. Invalid debt is a liability to them and they're not in the business of adjudicating disputes, so once provided with the evidence they drop the matter (of course the provider can still pursue you directly, which is why it's important to keep evidence of your good-faith efforts to resolve the matter).
Of course this only works if you have an alternative to switch to, which OP and most people in the US do not. I can't burn my relationship with my ISP because then I will not be able to do my job.
Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.
So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing will be done until the move was completed.
I really had no complaints about Xfinity service other than the limited outbound bandwidth. But when our city deployed their own fiber ISP and our neighborhood was one of the first to get deployed, I was anxious to switch. The week they pulled the fiber down our street, a manager at Xfinity came down our street super concerned with keeping our business.
Prior to the city fiber we had no real other choice (4-6Mbps DSL or terrestrial wireless that was struggling). Having real alternative pushed the Xfinity price down by at least half, and made them start to care. The phone company has started deploying fiber in the last year or so as well.
So, I worked for Cox in the late 90s - early 2000s where in many Louisiana cities we had dial up return cable modems. Yea, these things sucked as bad as you would expect. The city pleaded with Cox to upgrade to a 2 way cable system offering incentives and low interest bonds, etc. Anything to get better internet. We wouldn't budge.
So, the city started a municipal fiber push. In 24 hours the company released 2 million dollars in funds to.... no, not upgrade and work on infrastructure. For advertising against 'city socialism' and political donations.
if downgrading to docsis 3.0 (or downgrading to 500/700mb) “fixed” your issue, you probably have a 5-1000mhz splitter thats not just a rf splitter but also, a filter and its JUST leaky enough to allow 1002mhz through.
or maybe the modems happy negotiating down to 900mhz.
but maybe not quite enough for 1008-1100+ required by docsis 3.1
there will be anecdotal reports of a 5-1000mhz splitter “working just fine” maybe that ones a REALLY leaky filter thats also allowing 1008mhz.
or also a case of negotiating a lower channel…
gigabit speed and docsis 3.0 are about the threshold for the 5-1000mhz
problems would manifest with docsis 3.1, gigabit speed(maybe) and then almost guaranteed at 1.2 gig service+
this idea of “sensitive channels” is extremely close to nailing it
splitters fail as well. they’ll bleed through AND filter bands theyre not supposed to. but i didnt seize on that or inside wiring for OP because “the neighbor gets it too”
im on a gigabit implementation that has to have +/- 1100mhz , and my own woes uncovered an 800mhz splitter inside a wallplate. it would lock. it would even run at gig somehow. just not very well. its a 5-2500mhz splitter now. a 5-1200mhz would also do (for now)
everyone on your tap should be using multiplexed signals, and you should have a good 300mhz or so to play with and lock onto. but if every single one of you gets kneecapped at +/- 1000mhz, then theres a really congested 100mhz band and another 100-200mhz thats open for everyone but you cant lock on to it.
Diagnostics mastery note: logically ruling out a readily testable possibility is only (somewhat) logical when one hasn’t exhausted all other possibilities. Displeasing and successful diagnostic tests that ought not to differentiate but do are how one exposes issues hiding in the blind spots of other experts. (If they hadn’t explicitly said ‘I have no ideas left’ in as many words, I probably wouldn’t have posted at all.) Here is an idea they hadn’t openly said they considered. The reasons this idea might or might not pan out are still interesting to me! TIL! But it was a beautiful and consumer-accessible scalpel of diagnostic and earned me a walkthrough of the signal contamination specifics by the senior truck tech who showed up to help the lesser truck tech, so perhaps it’ll help another.
on friday theyd just settled on tacking new drops and outlets to the crown molding as a solution. i was the second one they were about to do it for. its a building that had maintained its 90-100 year old character and kept all the infrastructure concealed and elegant for all these years .
i would have dug a LOT deeper as a tech before i ever did that to your property.
and then even if it is you. half these guys would just as soon drill a hole through your wall and run cables along your siding or brick and be on to the next ticket. they dont run wall fishes or do a mission impossible in the dead space of an MDU or crawl up into a hot attic full of bees like we used to. maybe its contracting culture where you get $40, if that, for the connection and dont get anything extra for effort or aesthetics.
thats a lost art for cable techs and you gotta hire an electrician A/V or phone tech for that now.
and thats … exactly what im going to have to do to get at&t fiber up here from the facilities in our basement whenever ive finally had it with spectrum because apparently this is a lost art over at at&t as well! and “im not allowed to do it” /rant
How did you know when the radio tower was transmitting?
There's no point in performing random experiments if you've already ruled out those causes in some way. It would also require either renting a modem temporarily or buying one.
I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was showing up in advertising on the same road family business is on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site. Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete. Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location went from 300/20 to 300/300.
Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared to buy my own modems. Thankfully it’s been pretty reliable, better than the power utility (especially since comcast will literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in extended outages).
The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday, raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen: FCC, local politicians, etc.
You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a single phone call.
That said, most ISPs won’t escalate when there’s an OR problem, or at least take a long time to, and then the OR tech is usually just trained to test the cable coming in and not a lot else.
I used to be with Andrew’s and Arnold (run by @revk who surfaces around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your behalf.
(I do get that Starlink is also quite expensive if it is not your only serious choice)
I'm a heavy user myself and would be perfectly pleased with a symmetric 100/100 connection, but would even rather make due with 20/20 if that meant no regular outages, so I would agree with you but OP's needs seem specific
The fiber line is obviously my primary and it's completely flawless when it's working. The problem is that about once or twice a year a utility contractor will break the fiber in my neighborhood and it can go out for up to 2 days. Cellular service is not sufficient to cover. The cable connection is what I use when the fiber goes down hard like that. I don't bother with a multi-WAN router or anything. It's a manual cutover thing. The cable can obviously go down too, but it follows a different path (power lines vs buried). The cable is more likely to go out, but it can be resolved more quickly assuming a localized incident.
I was looking at using starlink for backup, but there are caveats with satellite connectivity in the woods.
They claim something/someone in the curb is interfering but neither trace it down nor fix it.
First, it was clearly a problem in the house.
Weeks later it suddenly was a regional issue that needed massive infrastructure updates.
Then it became a problem caused by a single household creating massive interference, that they need to find.
Months later they went back to infrastructure updates.
After 9 months of this shit I reported the issue to Bundesnetzagentur.
My next call to Vodafone and they "suddenly" offer to reduce my monthly subscription fee. After threatening to call the BNetzA again, they also offered to payback part of the fees of the previous 9 months.
The problem was magically resolved 3 months later. I'm on the reduced monthly fee ever since. They have forgotten to raise it back to normal and I'm not reminding them about it because they have been such assholes about it.
When on a business contract it's ok, but private contracts? Oh hell have they been plagued with scandals.
Worst is Xfinity will do everything to blame it on you including charge you, the customer, for new cable lines and junction box. Rusted out splitters is also common.
But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case).
I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices.
I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times.
My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?
Github is still famously IPv4 only. I don't know if there is a split between the SSH (if you use SSH to access the repos) and HTTPS (the tarballs) setup on their end, so maybe you get full speed on IPv6 and limited on IPv4 (or the other way around). Try disabling IPv6 on your end, if the speeds match then this might be it. If IPv6 is fast using an IPv4 gateway that tunnels via an IPv6 VPN might be a workaround.
I also had a similar problem a while back. Some speedtests showed more bandwidth than I could get in regular HTTPS downloads. I could get multiple downloads running at the same time that in total added up to the expected speed. In my case the line was just lossy enough (TCP retransmits in Wireshark) for TCP to never scale up its window size properly beyond a certain limit per connection. I verified this by running iperf in TCP and UDP against a gigabit server, UDP reached near full speed because it didn't care about a few lost packages. Working around that issue might be a bit harder, maybe [1] via [2] can provide some ideas to look into.
Yes, this is behavior I am seeing on my end too. On Arch Linux, I enabled parallel downloads for updates via pacman. Whenever updating my system, I can saturate my connection, but as soon as I get down to one huge package, like wallpapers or rocm-llvm, the download speed for that package is only 8 MB/s.
Considering the fact that I get full speeds everywhere whenever I'm using a VPN, am I right to assume that there is an issue with AT&T's internal routing? And, that issue doesn't effect every path? I'm not really an expert at doing networking stuff, but I wanna gather as much empirical data to construct a report and do statistical tests n stuff.
Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN connection is subjected to.
Take some pcaps of downloads that don't work. See if there's some common thing going on. Are you getting packets slowly with minimal loss or are there many missing packets? Does it seem like a path MTU issue [1]? Is the RTT reasonable?
Traceroutes from your side aren't the most helpful, but see what's the same and different between download IPs that work well and those that don't. If we assume congestion is from the internet to you, traceroutes from the download servers that don't work would be most useful, but that's hard to get. Sometimes you can find a hosting provider with test download urls and a looking glass, which can be pretty helpful if that's what you're experiencing.
Definitely look at ipv4 and ipv6. It's pretty common to get different routing between the same two endpoints on v4 and v6, so you get more debugging.
If it is a routing problem, be sure you're testing same IPs for download between native and VPN, if you download by hostname and the DNS resolves differently, try both IPs both ways... maybe you're just getting poor selection from DNS which can be addressed in different wayss. If your native DNS always gives you cross country servers and your VPN is local and gets local servers, there you go.
But if you do figure out the problem, you also need to find a way to escalate. Chances are phone support isn't going to be super helpful. Explore reddit to see if people get results there, find out what the replacement for dslreports is, etc.
Edit to add: when you do reach out, you want to share a concise summary and easy to repeat test; not so much all the research you did behind it. But ... that test should include multiple sources for the download or support will say it's a single site issue and close the ticket.
[1] I always blame PMTU, what does my test here show http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ If you don't get OK in all the boxes, that could be part of the problem... But that's usually slow start, not slow throughput after starting.
This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests.
Also, why wouldn't starlink be an alternative?
Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times). So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for Xfinity.
Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than his requirements, for one.
I'm pretty convinced it is RF interference. (Nearly) all DOCSIS interference is at node level, it's a shared system so any RF is going to knock out neighbouring properties.
He also could do with pasting the SNR and power levels for each DOCSIS channel :).
Fair enough if the author really needs 1gig, but I think it's pushing to say it's a monopoly based on that. 99% of residential users would not really notice 300mbit starlink vs 1gig (and starlink is likely to reach gig speeds in the next year or so).
The microbursts to pull down a full chonky 50MB modern web page actually do matter when you are on modern hardware capable of rendering it faster than the link speed. This was not always the case.
Going from 1.5gbps to 2.5gbps was not though.
Also, just because they advertise "up to 305Mbps" doesn't mean everyone is getting that. A friend of mine with Starlink in the midwest gets about 100Mbps during off-hours. See <https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-us-performance-2025> - median speeds are typically less than 150Mbps.
Starlink also costs about 2x-4x as much per Mbps as 1Gbps service (at least where I am). I doubt they're going to suddenly offer 1Gbps speeds in the next year without changing their pricing. They'll add a new, more expensive plan.
Even 1Gbps Starlink (which would be more than 3x the current max speeds) is going to have other differences such as increased latency (they mention 30-40ms in one place, 25-100ms in another), more jitter, and lost signal sometimes during bad weather. Starlink also uses CGNAT which eliminates a bunch of use cases and introduces its own problems with certain apps and games.
They've had issues with capacity before where they wouldn't accept signups for some areas. Adding capacity involves launching more satellites.
Starlink isn't the ultimate solution to everyone's Internet access problems.
It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I suspect Elon will push the pricing down further and further.
BTW according to the study I linked, less than half of Starlink customers get service that meets the anemic FCC definition of broadband.
> It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I suspect Elon will push the pricing down further and further.
This is hand-wavey conjecture, not an argument. He might lower the pricing if he gets enough welfare for his companies from the government. But only if that's a requirement, otherwise no he's not going to lower any pricing. The monthly pricing for Starlink has gone up, not down.
Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article, they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about it.
Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power.
Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.
I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.
But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.
I've been through the same thing the post author has. By some random chance I once called tech support and got someone on the phone who was authorized to investigate it and do something about it. Service improved a little bit after that.
Certainly, there's problems in some part of the network, and getting past level 1 tech support is hard. Physical security is pretty much unlikely. That said, I don't think those boxes are going to take much abuse to open even if they are locked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
A lot of the Northeast US that was impacted has fairly 'fresh' copper infrastructure in the last 20 years.
... but in reality, yeah. The outdoor plant does not get taken care of well (in general), there's only so many field techs to go around to be able to re-balance an entire RF system and its nodes.
Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength. Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem went away, they said another tech would come back out and check on it.
One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day to the dismay of the receptionist.
The case is the same here. Even if you broke up the cable monopoly so they all became regional companies, you still won’t have a choice but for one cable/internet provider in that same location unless the local phone company decides to compete and lay fiber.
Finally 7 days in a crew showed up in the street measuring each street cabinet. They were able to pinpoint the fault to a house 2 blocks down, where they told us a partial cable cut apparently had signal from their powerline flooding the coax signal. Once they decoupled that premise, signal in the area went back to normal.
We were lucky in that we had a DOCSIS 3.1 that tries to downregulate modulations when cable noise is present, so instead of going to 0 internet for a week like the older DOCSIS installs, our usual 500/30 Mbps still managed 0.1 - 3 Mbps up, so things like mail could still eventually get through.
Now looking into Starlink as a backup, as until they run fiber here, there is little alternative (besides vdsl, which is its own nightmare)
I've been through this multiple times. A lawyer friend of mine told me that in such cases only going through a legal battle would solve the problem but the amount of money and time for the zero return will get no interest of any lawyers.
You'll be out of luck unless yourself are a lawyer or you know someone being affected who is up to this tedious battle
A multitude of technicians came out and apologetically said there was a problem somewhere in a line, but they couldn’t get approval to really dig in because there just weren’t enough complaints - they theorized there was just one broken line somewhere in a bundle that water would seep in to, and we drew the short straw.
Finally, one technician very quietly suggested that my parents go to the phonebook and call the state public utilities regulation commission. I still remember that their number was found on the one blue page in the telephone book.
Within a few business days, there were half a dozen lineman out stringing new lines, and a supervisor apologizing to my parents, promising the issue would be fixed that day, and giving his direct line to them with the instructions to call if they ever had phone trouble again.
My dad generally distrusts the government, but still marvels at that response to this day.
I’ve had issues like this with all 3 of my past 3 ISPs, which included Comcast, Astound (WaveG), and CenturyLink. The last two are even gigabit fiber…
Astound had an issue where their upstream device wouldn’t let me get an IPv6 address (despite allegedly supporting it) and some packet sniffing revealed a specific issue that of course no support could help with. So any customer in this building will continue having that problem. Anyways, I ultimately canceled service after they had a 36 hour outage in the summer with no storms. And this was in downtown Seattle — the two closest buildings are a god damned datacenter and Amazon offices.
CenturyLink was slightly better… but I noticed after signing up for the service that the fiber line going to their ONT had a bad kink in it which obviously breaks fiber. It took me like 5 chats and a couple phone calls to get them to send a technician, and even then, the technician said I was lucky they sent the only person who had and knew how to use the fiber splicer thing… That shouldn’t be fucking lucky! Every single person I talked to knew I needed my fiber line to be spliced because I told them exactly what the problem and fix was. Absolutely absurd.
Executives should be punished for making customer service categorically awful, and yet they simply get promotions and bonuses for making it cheaper. I hope every exec who decided to make customer support useless could have these stories shoved down their throats for the rest of their lives.
Recently when Optimum in NYC broke their IPv6, only 1 out of the 5 tech support people I talked to knew what IPv6 is. None of them fixed the problem. The problem resolved after a couple of days, so I assume someone finally noticed their infrastructure was broken. Incredibly frustrating to deal with an impenetrable wall of incompetence.
Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact with a network engineer would be helpful
Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve your issue
- Jason (I work at Comcast)
They’re already paying for it, they’ve built businesses around their monopolies. The ads you see on streaming networks telling you how bad 5G home internet is is their death rattle.
The moral of the story is to find someone who works at Comcast who has Engineer in their job title and reach out directly. Linkedin is your friend here.
As a technologist, I could understand there are a variety of possible causes, some not their fault, but then they had to go and be unambiguously jerky...
My mistake was contacting support, about what seemed like a port-filtering problem after they temporarily backed out the upgrade. After I was forwarded to the wrong kind of CSR, so I cut that short, apparently (I learned later) the CSR slammed me into a more expensive plan, and also video streaming.
After I realized I got slammed, and got into a support chat to undo that... I got what seemed to be a highly-skilled jerking-around, for literally an hour, where they kept trying a large set of dirty tricks, never just canceling the new things and giving me back the plan I'd had hours earlier. I finally told them that they needed to undo the slamming, and to email me confirming they're done that, since I would not be contacting Comcast again, and would instead call the AG's office and regulators. No email came, and then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill.
I'm sure the dirty tricks call center person preserved their dirty tricks metrics for the day. And, further up the org chart, the rest of the machine continued to run in the default sketchy profit-maximizing (and, more to the point, individual-bonuses-and-promotions-maximizing) ways.
So I think the first step is to leverage remaining good government, to make the company regret multiples of every dollar they've made by behaving this way to everyone, not only to me. Of course, making a company feel significant pain still won't directly end the problem, until either shareholders make CEOs and boards feel pain personally, or until more executives are criminally held responsible for knowingly leading criminal behavior of companies -- but making the balance sheet feel pain will be a start.
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Original comment:
> then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill.
And yet you let them do it, didn't recall the payment, and seemingly didn't even follow up on the threat?
Looks like mission accomplished for them, of course the customer service monkey is going to do this again and everyone else will also happily look the other way while it's happening.
Yes, corporation-on-consumer-fraud becoming de-facto legal is a major problem (that is unlikely to be something the current US government will address), but it mostly relies on fear/apathy and 90% of people caving in and paying (like you did); disputing the payment is easy and then the ball goes into their court and they must prove you agreed to this new contract/upgrade (which they can't) if they want to get paid.
So I called Xfinity support to report the outage, the tech did some digging when I told him a bunch of local people seemed to be impacted, he found a report in their systems of an outage impacting my area.
I asked him if he had tried rebooting their router.
After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service.
And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They literally don’t want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay them in a month.
The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people who can do more than just read a script “did you unplug it and plug it back in?”
Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don’t let things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the local government that you can vote out), and so “bad enough” is pretty bad compared to a place with real competition.
It sucks, but there it is.
Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they just don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.
The real challenge is then getting that access out to all the surrounding individual homes and businesses. Laying fiber in streets or overhead can be legally difficult and it's also just a ton of physical labour.
If any millionaires or mad scientists are reading this and frustrated with their own internet access, though, please give it a try. There are tons of success stories where someone just created a small ISP to free their small town from an internet monopoly that everyone hated.
However, the incumbent monopoly might lower prices and improve service quality to match yours. Which is almost mission accomplished, except for the losses you'll be making...
I also recently dumped Xfinity cable modem service. It was reliable for 10 years and then all of a sudden it wasn’t.
In 15 years, that was my only complaint
Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster support:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...
Most don't notice it, as refreshing the address or happyeyeballs works around it.
Probably?
These companies continuing to offer service this unreliable and terrible is not unlike the GM fiasco of the FWD X platform in the 80s¹, where the company deliberately attempted to conceal faulty brakes that led to the deaths of over a hundred people while still selling the affected vehicles.
The advertising these companies perform regarding this defective service amounts to fraud.
The country would be a better place if Xfinity and Charter/Spectrum simply ceased existing such that sufficient demand for reliable modern fiber infrastructure became too powerful of a market force to ignore in regions previously dominated by these incompetent-bordering-on-negligent parasitic fraudsters.
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_X_platform_(FWD...
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
Bunch of
UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing
have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile?
i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time ..
and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case
after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate.
TLDR:
you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still.
MORE:
OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it).
but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb.
spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters
ANECODTAL:
my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds.
techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment.
TECHNICAL:
i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz
its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter.
its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through.
sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>
i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 , but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just yesterday:
- expires in 6 months
the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer service “look, i connected at the drop and have the same issue its NOT my inside wiring.”
everything from that point back is their problem and they owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof and go back with it.
in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i unfortunately had some digging to do
its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go ripping open all their wall plates and checking every inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one. unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what needs to be done.
but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it. maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts end faster when they review it.
or, plugging your modem into your dmarc/outside box for a little bit would also confirm or deny this
OP if you're organizing let me know I have a burning fire passion for xfinity to get their just desserts
It would sure be great to have internet classified as a public utility.
Maybe they were doing this?
There's another article on that site about how I sued Subaru of America for covering up an octane issue.
I've had a very similar problem with my cable internet circa 2010. It must have been DOCSIS 3.0. Multiple times a day my connection would stop working completely. The modem's 'connected' and 'carrier up' and 'carrier down' lights were on, and I had LAN communication with the modem, but no data would pass though on the WAN side.
From the management page of the modem (I later learned you weren't supposed to know about) I could see the upstream and downstream carriers were correctly established and still operational, but on the IP (PPPoE) level the TX (upstream) packet counter was increasing, but the RX (downstream) packet counter did not. Releasing the IP on my router (remember, it was PPPoE), then waiting 10 minutes or so before renewing the IP via DHCP would bring connectivity back.
I would call to my ISP (the largest ISP in my country) to try to resolve the issue. Every. Single. Time. I had to explain to the support employee that yes, I did disconnect and reconnect power, yes, my computer's software was up to date, yes, I did try connecting via LAN directly to the modem to eliminate any possible router issues, etc.
Now, at this point in the story I should point out that I held a degree in electrical engineering, specialising in embedded systems and high-speed data transmission and also had just about all Cisco networking certifications. I was more than qualified to design cable modems myself, imagine the frustration wasn't able to fix this issue.
One night I came home to the same problem, called customer service again, fully prepared to do the 'dance' of answering every basic troubleshooting question. But to my surprise, the guy on the phone seemed legit knowledgable. When I described him the symptoms I saw from the modem's management page he was rather surprised that I managed to discover that functionality, but said he knew what the problem would be then.
The support employee was quickly to confirm that someone in my neighbourhood hard-coded his IP-address instead of allowing DHCP (a common trick back in the day to get a static IP on a residential cable connection), and that that IP was clashing with the IP their DHCP would assign to my router's MAC address. He asked me what brand of router I had, and had to explain to him that it was a self-built OpenBSD box. His response was: "great! then you probably know how to spoof the MAC on your WAN interface then?". I did, I changed my MAC to a value he gave me, and immediately my connection came back up. He explained me that any MAC address starting with AB:BA (named after the band) was reserved for a special block of customers with this kind of issue.
We continued chatting a bit about DOCSIS, networking technology, modulation types, OpenBSD (it was also his favourite OS) and much more nerdy stuff. At some point I asked him, respectfully, how someone with his knowledge ended up at the support helpdesk of an ISP. He then told me he was the ISP's CTO, in charge of all network operations, and that he was just manning the helpdesk while his colleagues were on a diner break...
many such cases...
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...
which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and lower quality steel than international competitors who were using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern processes. In a market economy they would have been forced to go out of business or invest in new equipment —- that is, make a disinvestment that they didn’t want to make (that’s why they call it “capital(ism)”), it’s like the capital makes decisions on its own.
Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long term, but what we did get was much more complex and path dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a great business that built out infrastructure which could be repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out good infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet.
>makes decisions on its own
Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"?
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-...
A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget.
Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?)
-Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive)
-NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself )
Literary case study: The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist)
Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism
I can't believe the things you learned to justify in US
2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems.
your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting.
3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace.
coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized.
nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it.
the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.
2. Can you provide a source for that?
3. According to the article, the neighbor has the same issue with the same timing. So it's not the modem or inside wiring.