4 ms·

This is the real reason. 90+% of their customers are, for lack of a better word, idiots when it comes to “hacking”. The ISP just doesn’t want to deal with it. A

This is the real reason. 90+% of their customers are, for lack of a better word, idiots when it comes to “hacking”. The ISP just doesn’t want to deal with it. And for the 10-% who do know what they’d be doing, the ISP doesn’t care because it’s another configuration they have to support. There’s a reason ISPs won’t help you if you hook your own router up. It’s not malicious. Just then doing what makes sense from a financial and a training standpoint. It’s scummy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect with tech is very real.

cbozeman 6y ago
I'm fine with that... if they can prove it. They have to release stats that show what percentage of customers called in with a custom firmware and how long it took the techs to solve their issue. I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Most of the time, they'll find their answer somewhere on a forum / blog post. I would actually be willing to bet money that technical support spends far less time with these people than it does with older customers who "can't be bothered with reading" or younger customers who grew up in the "it just works" generation. There seems to be a middle ground of people, I think we're called the Analog-To-Digital generation, that had to actually put effort into learning technology, because so much shit had to be manually configured, that we gained a pretty solid understanding of tech and we don't have the fear of it that I see in people even just five years older than me (I'm 40), and the lack of interest in digging around in the "guts" that I see in people far younger than me (25 and under).
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  When I was ~25 in the late 90s (now in my late 40s) I spent 3 months with a 'custom' guy. He was going in and re-writing our software stored procedures. They had to work a particular way or the whole harry ball came flying apart. 2 level one techs, 3 level two techs, 3 on site rebuilds with 3 installers and 4 senior engineers. 3 months of work. All because 1 dude decided to change things out and did not follow our extensive docs and use the people we dedicated to help him. All because he wanted a feature but did not want to pay for it but did not want to admit he broke the multi million dollar system they bought. It was like an hour of work for me and 1 line of code. But he jerked us around for months and cost us thousands of dollars of time and work and would scream at us for hours on end that nothing worked because he broke it. BTW The dudes who worked the .COM boom/bust stuff are hitting their 50s. When you are on your 15th uber framework sometimes you just wing it and dig in only if you have to. Or as I say to my fellow devs 'what useless tech skill am I going to learn today that I did not want to know about'. For my first couple of stacks I can tell you everything you want to know for hours on end. For current ones that passion is mostly gone. Crunched out of me with endless meetings and forms to fill out.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Or they followed a "how to get free movies/tv/sports" guide which told them to follow these simple steps, and something went wrong, and they have no idea what to do next, and they're offline now too.
aksss 6y ago
I would say 90% of their customers don’t want to be hacking their router, and 90% of those that do don’t really know what they’re doing.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Probably. And in that case, the ISP would be even more justified in not supporting “non standard” configurations.
tinus_hn 6y ago
So they can say: Connect the modem we gave you with our settings, and if it works using that it’s not our problem. It’s not that hard.

cbozeman 6y ago

I'm fine with that... if they can prove it. They have to release stats that show what percentage of customers called in with a custom firmware and how long it took the techs to solve their issue. I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Most of the time, they'll find their answer somewhere on a forum / blog post. I would actually be willing to bet money that technical support spends far less time with these people than it does with older customers who "can't be bothered with reading" or younger customers who grew up in the "it just works" generation. There seems to be a middle ground of people, I think we're called the Analog-To-Digital generation, that had to actually put effort into learning technology, because so much shit had to be manually configured, that we gained a pretty solid understanding of tech and we don't have the fear of it that I see in people even just five years older than me (I'm 40), and the lack of interest in digging around in the "guts" that I see in people far younger than me (25 and under).

sumtechguy 6y ago
When I was ~25 in the late 90s (now in my late 40s) I spent 3 months with a 'custom' guy. He was going in and re-writing our software stored procedures. They had to work a particular way or the whole harry ball came flying apart. 2 level one techs, 3 level two techs, 3 on site rebuilds with 3 installers and 4 senior engineers. 3 months of work. All because 1 dude decided to change things out and did not follow our extensive docs and use the people we dedicated to help him. All because he wanted a feature but did not want to pay for it but did not want to admit he broke the multi million dollar system they bought. It was like an hour of work for me and 1 line of code. But he jerked us around for months and cost us thousands of dollars of time and work and would scream at us for hours on end that nothing worked because he broke it. BTW The dudes who worked the .COM boom/bust stuff are hitting their 50s. When you are on your 15th uber framework sometimes you just wing it and dig in only if you have to. Or as I say to my fellow devs 'what useless tech skill am I going to learn today that I did not want to know about'. For my first couple of stacks I can tell you everything you want to know for hours on end. For current ones that passion is mostly gone. Crunched out of me with endless meetings and forms to fill out.
oarsinsync 6y ago
> I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Or they followed a "how to get free movies/tv/sports" guide which told them to follow these simple steps, and something went wrong, and they have no idea what to do next, and they're offline now too.

aksss 6y ago

I would say 90% of their customers don’t want to be hacking their router, and 90% of those that do don’t really know what they’re doing.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Probably. And in that case, the ISP would be even more justified in not supporting “non standard” configurations.

tinus_hn 6y ago

So they can say: Connect the modem we gave you with our settings, and if it works using that it’s not our problem. It’s not that hard.