Yeah its pretty weird I created a website just to write this article just so I could make this post. I'm so frustrated with these outages :(

There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.

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 had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample, I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't service it.

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.

I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.

Easy.

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.