8 ms·

I wasn't one of the conspiracy theorists but I do expect ISPs to get these things right. It's literally their job, they should be experts.

supertrope 9y ago
AT&T has long provided a sub-par Internet connection service. Their wireless router and DSL modem "U-Verse" gateway device lacks a true bridge mode, has a small NAT table, and you must use it because it contains a 802.1x certificate. You can use your own router with a rather involved hack: http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NAT-table-limits http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NA... They instructed customers (including small businesses) to get off 10.X.X.X, presumably because they were considering CG-NAT, although they have since done some IPv6 deployment. The original AT&T faded away with declining long distance revenue which they milked to the end until cellphones and Internet access became the main market. It took tax credits meant for "video dial tone" broadband deployment and used them to build their cellular network. Its ADSL deployment use PPPoE and ATM which can cause MTU mismatch. ATM itself is a telco mistake. European access oligopoly members wanted 32 bytes because that suited voice frame transport and they thought data transport would never sell. American counterparts wanted 64 bytes for better data delivery. They compromised on 53: 48 for payload and 5 for header. With newer "U-Verse" ASDL they've finally eliminated this layer of overhead. (But no more 3rd party modems). It decided to deploy VDSL instead of make the true upgrade to fiber. But they also cut costs by not building enough remote terminals so many customers have slow and unreliable links. Fast VDSL speeds (e.g. 100Mbps) aren't possible if customers are a mile away, or more. How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? Since 2005 they've been complaining that customers are using too much Internet and they need to slice and dice the Internet with data caps, application specific throttling, etc. And get more tax credits and deregulation which they promise will be used for broadband investment.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I've had better service from U-Verse and, more recently, AT&T Fiber than I have from Comcast. But really, the point this thread is making isn't about whether you approve of all of AT&T's business decisions, but rather whether their backbone engineers can properly manage a network. I'm interested in the opinions of people who have managed default-free BGP peering before on whether AT&T does a good job, but I'm not so much interested in reading another dslreports thread about whether AT&T is a "good ISP".
  - supertrope 9y ago
    This technical glitch is in their CPE boxes not the backbone network.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Good to know! Add to the set of people who's AT&T network engineering opinions are interesting "anyone who has managed a very large scale distribution layer network". :)
  - mjcl 9y ago
    My experience with AT&T was that they were overly bureaucratic but outside of those rules anything goes. For example, they didn't ask for an LOA for BGP announcements of other people's IP space. When we were turning up a new Comcast circuit we accidentally leaked Comcast's customer routes (~5000) to AT&T and they were accepted.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Calling their modem/routers sub-par is being far too generous. They are pieces of shit.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    From experience I can tell you that this guy is correct. Or at least he was. I had U-Verse as my first internet service at an apartment years ago and, in addition to waiting a month for them to hook it up, the modem they sent me didn't work. The tech came out (weeks later, of course), confirmed it didn't work, and proceeded to swap it with literally every single spare he had in his van. We got lucky on the last one. While chatting he admitted they were the some of the worst equipment he's ever seen. Some of the branch locations at work have U-Verse as their only option. I don't have to deal with their day-to-day problems but the help desk tells me they're still pretty crap.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      I am going to go extremely hard and say literally everything non porn related is a scam. TLDR fuck ICO
- halbritt 9y ago
  Eh, I'm using one of the crap Uverse gateways stuck in bridge mode connected their Gigapower service. I consistently get 900mbps up and down when connected to a GigE port. All this for $80. That's way, way above par IMHO. As a service. The gateways are still crap. Don't use 'em for routing or wireless. They are laughably bad.
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    Mine kept losing it's "bridge mode", maybe twice a year. Very frustrating and unpredictable when I was trying to access my x2go server remotely.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? There's always the chance they can try to put the customer on the hook for a truck roll, turning a loss into revenue.
- ferongr 9y ago
  You should come to Europe and see the completely shitty ZTE and Huawei CPEs carriers foist upon their users.
- Sir_Vival 9y ago
  I live in a rural area and depend on ATT's unlimited hotspot plan (that's now defunct) for my internet. It uses CG NAT and provides no IPv6 addresses. However, you throw a SIM card from your phone in the hotspot and you'll magically have an IPv6 address, even without changing the APN. It's ridiculous that I have to resort to using a VPN to bypass all the troubles being behind a CG NAT entails.
some_account 9y ago
Experts get things wrong constantly.
quakenul 9y ago
While it's reasonable to expect them to get it right, it is obviously going to go wrong from time to time, as with experts working any other field.
rayiner 9y ago
I was just gchatting my wife in Edge, and the message entry box wraps lines on the character level (breaking a single word over two lines). Something that nobody would ever want to do and nobody could possibly think is the right behavior. Google and Microsoft develop two of the only three relevant browser engines, and indeed have basically supplanted W3C in setting web standards. But a simple text-entry field on a Google site running in Microsoft's browser doesn't work properly. So is it really surprising that AT&T handled an obscure IP address the wrong way?
- sixothree 9y ago
  I am not surprised if/that google degrades the experience of their products on other browsers. I believe this has been topic of discussion a number of times on HN.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    I think Google is aware their products perform better on Chrome and does not devote resources to correct this, leading the user experiences on Edge or even firefox to be similar but not equal. I'd make the argument that the parent should not be down voted because Google, perhaps in a small way, allows degraded experiences on other platforms for one reason or another.
    - sli 9y ago
      There was a short time when Google made Hangouts Chrome-only, but faking the User-Agent would make it load. Turned out, yep, Hangouts worked totally fine in Firefox. They just refused to let me load it and that's it. I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while. A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.
      - leesalminen 9y ago
        I tried to use Hangouts last week with the latest Firefox on a beefy machine. While it wasn’t explicitly blocked, it froze the whole browser after 30 seconds. Never got into the meeting.
halbritt 9y ago
Yeah, no. ISPs don't really employ experts any more. The experts won't work for them. They haven't done anything innovative since the heady days of the dotcom boom.
cbsmith 9y ago
You have an amusing belief about the correlation between expertise and the lack of errors/mistakes. Also, reading your comment, I couldn't help but think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
monochromatic 9y ago
I’m an expert at my job. I still get things wrong sometimes.

supertrope 9y ago

AT&T has long provided a sub-par Internet connection service. Their wireless router and DSL modem "U-Verse" gateway device lacks a true bridge mode, has a small NAT table, and you must use it because it contains a 802.1x certificate. You can use your own router with a rather involved hack: http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NAT-table-limits http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NA... They instructed customers (including small businesses) to get off 10.X.X.X, presumably because they were considering CG-NAT, although they have since done some IPv6 deployment. The original AT&T faded away with declining long distance revenue which they milked to the end until cellphones and Internet access became the main market. It took tax credits meant for "video dial tone" broadband deployment and used them to build their cellular network. Its ADSL deployment use PPPoE and ATM which can cause MTU mismatch. ATM itself is a telco mistake. European access oligopoly members wanted 32 bytes because that suited voice frame transport and they thought data transport would never sell. American counterparts wanted 64 bytes for better data delivery. They compromised on 53: 48 for payload and 5 for header. With newer "U-Verse" ASDL they've finally eliminated this layer of overhead. (But no more 3rd party modems). It decided to deploy VDSL instead of make the true upgrade to fiber. But they also cut costs by not building enough remote terminals so many customers have slow and unreliable links. Fast VDSL speeds (e.g. 100Mbps) aren't possible if customers are a mile away, or more. How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? Since 2005 they've been complaining that customers are using too much Internet and they need to slice and dice the Internet with data caps, application specific throttling, etc. And get more tax credits and deregulation which they promise will be used for broadband investment.

tptacek 9y ago
I've had better service from U-Verse and, more recently, AT&T Fiber than I have from Comcast. But really, the point this thread is making isn't about whether you approve of all of AT&T's business decisions, but rather whether their backbone engineers can properly manage a network. I'm interested in the opinions of people who have managed default-free BGP peering before on whether AT&T does a good job, but I'm not so much interested in reading another dslreports thread about whether AT&T is a "good ISP".
- supertrope 9y ago
  This technical glitch is in their CPE boxes not the backbone network.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Good to know! Add to the set of people who's AT&T network engineering opinions are interesting "anyone who has managed a very large scale distribution layer network". :)
- mjcl 9y ago
  My experience with AT&T was that they were overly bureaucratic but outside of those rules anything goes. For example, they didn't ask for an LOA for BGP announcements of other people's IP space. When we were turning up a new Comcast circuit we accidentally leaked Comcast's customer routes (~5000) to AT&T and they were accepted.
paulie_a 9y ago
Calling their modem/routers sub-par is being far too generous. They are pieces of shit.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  From experience I can tell you that this guy is correct. Or at least he was. I had U-Verse as my first internet service at an apartment years ago and, in addition to waiting a month for them to hook it up, the modem they sent me didn't work. The tech came out (weeks later, of course), confirmed it didn't work, and proceeded to swap it with literally every single spare he had in his van. We got lucky on the last one. While chatting he admitted they were the some of the worst equipment he's ever seen. Some of the branch locations at work have U-Verse as their only option. I don't have to deal with their day-to-day problems but the help desk tells me they're still pretty crap.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    I am going to go extremely hard and say literally everything non porn related is a scam. TLDR fuck ICO
halbritt 9y ago
Eh, I'm using one of the crap Uverse gateways stuck in bridge mode connected their Gigapower service. I consistently get 900mbps up and down when connected to a GigE port. All this for $80. That's way, way above par IMHO. As a service. The gateways are still crap. Don't use 'em for routing or wireless. They are laughably bad.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  Mine kept losing it's "bridge mode", maybe twice a year. Very frustrating and unpredictable when I was trying to access my x2go server remotely.
kbenson 9y ago
> How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? There's always the chance they can try to put the customer on the hook for a truck roll, turning a loss into revenue.
ferongr 9y ago
You should come to Europe and see the completely shitty ZTE and Huawei CPEs carriers foist upon their users.
Sir_Vival 9y ago
I live in a rural area and depend on ATT's unlimited hotspot plan (that's now defunct) for my internet. It uses CG NAT and provides no IPv6 addresses. However, you throw a SIM card from your phone in the hotspot and you'll magically have an IPv6 address, even without changing the APN. It's ridiculous that I have to resort to using a VPN to bypass all the troubles being behind a CG NAT entails.

some_account 9y ago

Experts get things wrong constantly.

quakenul 9y ago

While it's reasonable to expect them to get it right, it is obviously going to go wrong from time to time, as with experts working any other field.

rayiner 9y ago

I was just gchatting my wife in Edge, and the message entry box wraps lines on the character level (breaking a single word over two lines). Something that nobody would ever want to do and nobody could possibly think is the right behavior. Google and Microsoft develop two of the only three relevant browser engines, and indeed have basically supplanted W3C in setting web standards. But a simple text-entry field on a Google site running in Microsoft's browser doesn't work properly. So is it really surprising that AT&T handled an obscure IP address the wrong way?

sixothree 9y ago
I am not surprised if/that google degrades the experience of their products on other browsers. I believe this has been topic of discussion a number of times on HN.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  I think Google is aware their products perform better on Chrome and does not devote resources to correct this, leading the user experiences on Edge or even firefox to be similar but not equal. I'd make the argument that the parent should not be down voted because Google, perhaps in a small way, allows degraded experiences on other platforms for one reason or another.
  - sli 9y ago
    There was a short time when Google made Hangouts Chrome-only, but faking the User-Agent would make it load. Turned out, yep, Hangouts worked totally fine in Firefox. They just refused to let me load it and that's it. I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while. A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.
    - leesalminen 9y ago
      I tried to use Hangouts last week with the latest Firefox on a beefy machine. While it wasn’t explicitly blocked, it froze the whole browser after 30 seconds. Never got into the meeting.

halbritt 9y ago

Yeah, no. ISPs don't really employ experts any more. The experts won't work for them. They haven't done anything innovative since the heady days of the dotcom boom.

cbsmith 9y ago

You have an amusing belief about the correlation between expertise and the lack of errors/mistakes. Also, reading your comment, I couldn't help but think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

monochromatic 9y ago

I’m an expert at my job. I still get things wrong sometimes.