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I wish they get some telemetry back from the modems and had some kind of KPI-driven process where they must proactively go out and rectify this stuff. In Austr

I wish they get some telemetry back from the modems and had some kind of KPI-driven process where they must proactively go out and rectify this stuff. In Australia a lot of people think that the new NBN (national broadband network) is terrible, but it is actually one of the most stable and cost-effective broadband networks. The reason people think that it is terrible is because older houses are connected via telephone cables that have a whole bunch of issues including poor workmanship left over from the previous private owner, whereas new estates that connect directly to the NBN via brand new fiber optic runs are incredibly fast and reliable for a consumer service. As a matter of fact, the NBN at my house costs around $100/month on fiber whereas my office/company business Telstra fiber costs around $1000/month. The speeds are comparable, but the SLA is different. Nevertheless, they have both been down about the same amount of time in the last year (not more than a few hours total). My mate who works at NBN thinks that this is because the government was allowed to operate NBN backbone at a total hemorrhaging loss of money (so expensive equipment and contractors are used), whereas Telstra has to operate profitably.

aragilar 3y ago
I wish I could get the telemetry, so I know when the modem wasn't working and needed a restart, or the NBN is just down... I'm not what networks you're comparing the NBN with, but NZ is far better... Also, not sure where you're getting the ~$1000/m number from, Telstra 's SMB NBN rates according to their website are also in the $100 range (no numbers for enterprise naturally), ~$1000 is probably either private Telstra fibre and covering the install cost or has better bandwidth/latency properties (from the NBNCo website it looks like there's Traffic Class 2 which is symmetric upload/download speeds, and Traffic Class 4 which is asymmetric, with Traffic Class 4 sounding the same as the home plan).
- aetherspawn 3y ago
  That’s what my company pays for traffic class 1 and SLA 99.95%
- buro9 3y ago
  Ripe Atlas probe coupled with Prometheus: https://labs.ripe.net/author/daniel_czerwonk/using-ripe-atlas-measurement-results-in-prometheus/ https://labs.ripe.net/author/daniel_czerwonk/using-ripe-atla... I get an alert for an internet outage (I use Grafana Cloud so the outage isn't preventing me from being alerted). I also have the side benefit of historical information on the health of the connection.
- m463 3y ago
  I just run monitoring software - ping something on my network - ping the router - ping the gateway on the other side of the router - ping something well-known my last place, I also wrote software that would enter the web interface of my model and reboot it sometimes.
phil21 3y ago
> I wish they get some telemetry back from the modems and had some kind of KPI-driven process Another lifetime ago back when cable modems were still fairly new (and uncappable!) you could do this yourself. The modems would all be on RFC1918 space, and be completely reachable to anyone who thought to look. They had a standard SNMP MIB which you could use to graph out signal strength, bandwidth usage, etc. I of course fired up rrdtool and started mapping out my neighborhood. It was quite interesting to be able to detect problems and actually respond to them proactively. Since the modems were all default settings, you also had r/w SNMP access so you could write to the "reboot" OID among others. It was pretty trivial to script something that would boot off the habitual heavy users during peak times when you wanted to do some gaming. Fun times. But I also always wondered back then why the hell Comcast (or whomever) wouldn't pay some kid like me $15/hr to build the same telemetry.
thedougd 3y ago
I lived on a street where we discovered through Nextdoor that we were all suffering from cable modem outages at the same times. It persisted for six months before whatever piece of equipment that serviced our street died for good. Only then did we get it fixed. It's absurd that an ISP isn't monitoring, correlating, and responding to telemetry to inform of these problems without a trouble ticket.
- treeman79 3y ago
  Our neighborhood would periodically have 200 foot electric extension cables, running around yards and such to power the equipment. They would be in place for months before they eventually got new powerlines dug. Happened multiple times over the years, so it was quite common to see orange lions running all over the neighborhood.
- m463 3y ago
  probably telemetry was down when you had the outage :)

aragilar 3y ago

I wish I could get the telemetry, so I know when the modem wasn't working and needed a restart, or the NBN is just down... I'm not what networks you're comparing the NBN with, but NZ is far better... Also, not sure where you're getting the ~$1000/m number from, Telstra 's SMB NBN rates according to their website are also in the $100 range (no numbers for enterprise naturally), ~$1000 is probably either private Telstra fibre and covering the install cost or has better bandwidth/latency properties (from the NBNCo website it looks like there's Traffic Class 2 which is symmetric upload/download speeds, and Traffic Class 4 which is asymmetric, with Traffic Class 4 sounding the same as the home plan).

aetherspawn 3y ago
That’s what my company pays for traffic class 1 and SLA 99.95%
buro9 3y ago
Ripe Atlas probe coupled with Prometheus: https://labs.ripe.net/author/daniel_czerwonk/using-ripe-atlas-measurement-results-in-prometheus/ https://labs.ripe.net/author/daniel_czerwonk/using-ripe-atla... I get an alert for an internet outage (I use Grafana Cloud so the outage isn't preventing me from being alerted). I also have the side benefit of historical information on the health of the connection.
m463 3y ago
I just run monitoring software - ping something on my network - ping the router - ping the gateway on the other side of the router - ping something well-known my last place, I also wrote software that would enter the web interface of my model and reboot it sometimes.

phil21 3y ago

> I wish they get some telemetry back from the modems and had some kind of KPI-driven process Another lifetime ago back when cable modems were still fairly new (and uncappable!) you could do this yourself. The modems would all be on RFC1918 space, and be completely reachable to anyone who thought to look. They had a standard SNMP MIB which you could use to graph out signal strength, bandwidth usage, etc. I of course fired up rrdtool and started mapping out my neighborhood. It was quite interesting to be able to detect problems and actually respond to them proactively. Since the modems were all default settings, you also had r/w SNMP access so you could write to the "reboot" OID among others. It was pretty trivial to script something that would boot off the habitual heavy users during peak times when you wanted to do some gaming. Fun times. But I also always wondered back then why the hell Comcast (or whomever) wouldn't pay some kid like me $15/hr to build the same telemetry.

thedougd 3y ago

I lived on a street where we discovered through Nextdoor that we were all suffering from cable modem outages at the same times. It persisted for six months before whatever piece of equipment that serviced our street died for good. Only then did we get it fixed. It's absurd that an ISP isn't monitoring, correlating, and responding to telemetry to inform of these problems without a trouble ticket.

treeman79 3y ago
Our neighborhood would periodically have 200 foot electric extension cables, running around yards and such to power the equipment. They would be in place for months before they eventually got new powerlines dug. Happened multiple times over the years, so it was quite common to see orange lions running all over the neighborhood.
m463 3y ago
probably telemetry was down when you had the outage :)