5 ms·

Ironically I would probably pay more for a dumber, but more reliable pipe. My operator changed my modem, and its configuration is "easier than ever!" (says the

Ironically I would probably pay more for a dumber, but more reliable pipe. My operator changed my modem, and its configuration is "easier than ever!" (says the manual). That is, you have to use your account page on their website to change the wifi settings, and the more advanced part of it you must install an app on your phone. But you can't specify a custom DNS (which I'm sure the default router firmware would let you do). So yeah, just give me a modem, and I'll do everything myself.

Semaphor 3y ago
While I’m glad I can do it at all, my cable modem requires logging into their webservice, and flip a switch there to turn it from modem + router into just a modem. Still confuses me how that’s not a setting in the modem interface.
speff 3y ago
You can get that. It’s a business account. It costs more because that’s the actual price of a dedicated line with an uptime SLA.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Almost every single ISP I've worked with will let you put modem routers into "bridge" mode where it bridges the modem side to Ethernet and there's your mostly dumb modem pushing a public IP to whatever you plug in to it. Cable companies get sneaky sneaky and keep some wifi crap on for their cell phone plans though.
hansvm 3y ago
> you must install an app on your phone I _love_ those. When I'm trying to configure my modem, nothing gets my nether regions tingly faster than (1) Visiting the documented configuration site on the back of the modem (2) It 404s in a new and excitingly different way from every other modem you've owned (3) After visiting a nearby business with working internet, the helpful interblags populace suggests you need an app, for ... reasons (3a) At least in the old days, that was just a blatant money grab (harvest your location history and contact list, spam notifications, and so on). Now with halfway decent permissions it's less clear why they're such a-holes about it. (4) You have the foresight to install the app while internet is available. (5) Your phone is 2 years old, and the manufacturer views bare-minimum due-diligence updates as a liability and hasn't packaged the latest OS updates. Google simultaneously doesn't trust you to update your phone without somebody-other-than-them taking the liability and also highly recommends all their app developers to only target the very latest Android version. None of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts work on your phone because 2yo devices are practically fossil fuels in the making at this point. (6) You surf the interblags for an old version of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts. After searching long enough, you have a >50% chance of having found the real archive and not a virus, since Google refuses to host old APKs. (7) By sheer luck, that suffices, and your modem manufacturer doesn't have one of those "your thingamawhutt version is too old" screens in their app. (8) You go back home, where it's safe and all is well, and when you try to configure your modem you find that the app only works if it can phone home to the mothership. That's a fine thing to want to do, except the only reason you're using the blasted app is because you don't have internet at home and would like to rectify the deficiency. (9) After a bit of contemplation on the life choices that led you to this moment, you recall that your wife's phone can produce a hotspot that might remedy the immediate clusterfuck. (10) That doesn't work. Her phone has internet and working hardware, but Google has decided to ask her cell provider if she's allowed to share the hardware she purchased with nearby devices for a single crisis moment. Her cell provider says that she can do anything she would like with the device she paid for and owns, so long as they also get paid repeatedly. And so on. I'm having fun, reply if you want me to continue the saga, but IME an app is a very poor choice for configuring a modem, and that sort of bullshit has bit me in more ways than I can count. Even when you can get the damned thing to work, like OP mentions, the settings aren't anywhere near as nice as what the firmware natively supports.
- sehro 3y ago
  Is there a reason your phone doesn't have data services in this example?
  - hansvm 3y ago
    I missed that detail (it was illustrative and intended to be slightly humorous). A few that come to mind from my last few years: - The modem in question is in the lower floors of a skyscraper. Nobody has good service. Incidentally, till wifi texting and calling became popular, that made forced SMS 2FA way more annoying than it already was -- run outside to catch a bar of service, try to get back to your apartment before the 2FA code expires. - The modem in question is in the middle of nowhere (or some approximation thereof, like an hour or two out of Laramie WY). You technically have 50 kilobits per second of download throughput, but that's painful when the modem configuration app is 28 megabytes. It doesn't help that modern sites clock in at megabytes, and most of your software and hardware nowadays assumes anything over 10 seconds to a minute or so per request is a failure and times it out, making browsing some sites _literally_ impossible rather than just slow. - You recently meddled with your APN settings and tweaked the one field that makes your phone helpfully decide to not display that APN entry, and it coincidentally means you don't have data service. Not having memorized 20 random ports and uris and stringly typed feature flags, you can't fix it without outside help. - Your cell provider decided to increase your rates without notice when the contract renewed. You don't like being surprised by that sort of thing and had a spending cap on the card to prevent it, but you were instead surprised by a lack of cell service. - Your cell provider's autopay functionality is broken the one day that year you needed it to work (friend's experience, not mine). - Your cell provider had a bug double-counting data usage the one month you planned to get near the limit. Without internet you can't connect to their customer support to get that fixed (to their credit, customer support was fast and hassle-free). - You're pinching pennies to get through college. You only have a phone because your bank won't let you in without SMS 2FA. It's only a smartphone because the cheapest of those are cheaper than the cheapest dumb phones nowadays (and you bought it used anyway). You don't have a data plan because that's an extravagent and unnecessary expense. (Why are you buying internet in this event? No clue, but it's another reason somebody might not have cell data, and I'm sure amongst the 3M people in the US with smartphones without a data plan some of them have self-consistent reasons for getting internet at home). And so on. Any given day, lots of people have smartphones without data.
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
There's EU-wide regulation[1] and local (Dutch) legislation stating that ISPs must allow people to use their own hardware. My ISP (KPN) complies pretty well. Their website even has clear documentation (in Dutch) with all the configuration details in case you want to set up your own fibre-optics modem, and the details on the VLAN to use for internet and telephony over it[2]. I use the ISP-supplied fibre modem plugged into an OpenWrt router. The router itself does PPPoE via VLAN. I hope you can get your ISP to follow such an example. [1]: https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200601-01.en.html https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200601-01.en.html [2]: https://www.kpn.com/service/eigen-apparatuur https://www.kpn.com/service/eigen-apparatuur

Semaphor 3y ago

While I’m glad I can do it at all, my cable modem requires logging into their webservice, and flip a switch there to turn it from modem + router into just a modem. Still confuses me how that’s not a setting in the modem interface.

speff 3y ago

You can get that. It’s a business account. It costs more because that’s the actual price of a dedicated line with an uptime SLA.

hypercube33 3y ago
Almost every single ISP I've worked with will let you put modem routers into "bridge" mode where it bridges the modem side to Ethernet and there's your mostly dumb modem pushing a public IP to whatever you plug in to it. Cable companies get sneaky sneaky and keep some wifi crap on for their cell phone plans though.

hansvm 3y ago

> you must install an app on your phone I _love_ those. When I'm trying to configure my modem, nothing gets my nether regions tingly faster than (1) Visiting the documented configuration site on the back of the modem (2) It 404s in a new and excitingly different way from every other modem you've owned (3) After visiting a nearby business with working internet, the helpful interblags populace suggests you need an app, for ... reasons (3a) At least in the old days, that was just a blatant money grab (harvest your location history and contact list, spam notifications, and so on). Now with halfway decent permissions it's less clear why they're such a-holes about it. (4) You have the foresight to install the app while internet is available. (5) Your phone is 2 years old, and the manufacturer views bare-minimum due-diligence updates as a liability and hasn't packaged the latest OS updates. Google simultaneously doesn't trust you to update your phone without somebody-other-than-them taking the liability and also highly recommends all their app developers to only target the very latest Android version. None of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts work on your phone because 2yo devices are practically fossil fuels in the making at this point. (6) You surf the interblags for an old version of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts. After searching long enough, you have a >50% chance of having found the real archive and not a virus, since Google refuses to host old APKs. (7) By sheer luck, that suffices, and your modem manufacturer doesn't have one of those "your thingamawhutt version is too old" screens in their app. (8) You go back home, where it's safe and all is well, and when you try to configure your modem you find that the app only works if it can phone home to the mothership. That's a fine thing to want to do, except the only reason you're using the blasted app is because you don't have internet at home and would like to rectify the deficiency. (9) After a bit of contemplation on the life choices that led you to this moment, you recall that your wife's phone can produce a hotspot that might remedy the immediate clusterfuck. (10) That doesn't work. Her phone has internet and working hardware, but Google has decided to ask her cell provider if she's allowed to share the hardware she purchased with nearby devices for a single crisis moment. Her cell provider says that she can do anything she would like with the device she paid for and owns, so long as they also get paid repeatedly. And so on. I'm having fun, reply if you want me to continue the saga, but IME an app is a very poor choice for configuring a modem, and that sort of bullshit has bit me in more ways than I can count. Even when you can get the damned thing to work, like OP mentions, the settings aren't anywhere near as nice as what the firmware natively supports.

sehro 3y ago
Is there a reason your phone doesn't have data services in this example?
- hansvm 3y ago
  I missed that detail (it was illustrative and intended to be slightly humorous). A few that come to mind from my last few years: - The modem in question is in the lower floors of a skyscraper. Nobody has good service. Incidentally, till wifi texting and calling became popular, that made forced SMS 2FA way more annoying than it already was -- run outside to catch a bar of service, try to get back to your apartment before the 2FA code expires. - The modem in question is in the middle of nowhere (or some approximation thereof, like an hour or two out of Laramie WY). You technically have 50 kilobits per second of download throughput, but that's painful when the modem configuration app is 28 megabytes. It doesn't help that modern sites clock in at megabytes, and most of your software and hardware nowadays assumes anything over 10 seconds to a minute or so per request is a failure and times it out, making browsing some sites _literally_ impossible rather than just slow. - You recently meddled with your APN settings and tweaked the one field that makes your phone helpfully decide to not display that APN entry, and it coincidentally means you don't have data service. Not having memorized 20 random ports and uris and stringly typed feature flags, you can't fix it without outside help. - Your cell provider decided to increase your rates without notice when the contract renewed. You don't like being surprised by that sort of thing and had a spending cap on the card to prevent it, but you were instead surprised by a lack of cell service. - Your cell provider's autopay functionality is broken the one day that year you needed it to work (friend's experience, not mine). - Your cell provider had a bug double-counting data usage the one month you planned to get near the limit. Without internet you can't connect to their customer support to get that fixed (to their credit, customer support was fast and hassle-free). - You're pinching pennies to get through college. You only have a phone because your bank won't let you in without SMS 2FA. It's only a smartphone because the cheapest of those are cheaper than the cheapest dumb phones nowadays (and you bought it used anyway). You don't have a data plan because that's an extravagent and unnecessary expense. (Why are you buying internet in this event? No clue, but it's another reason somebody might not have cell data, and I'm sure amongst the 3M people in the US with smartphones without a data plan some of them have self-consistent reasons for getting internet at home). And so on. Any given day, lots of people have smartphones without data.

WhyNotHugo 3y ago

There's EU-wide regulation[1] and local (Dutch) legislation stating that ISPs must allow people to use their own hardware. My ISP (KPN) complies pretty well. Their website even has clear documentation (in Dutch) with all the configuration details in case you want to set up your own fibre-optics modem, and the details on the VLAN to use for internet and telephony over it[2]. I use the ISP-supplied fibre modem plugged into an OpenWrt router. The router itself does PPPoE via VLAN. I hope you can get your ISP to follow such an example. [1]: https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200601-01.en.html https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200601-01.en.html [2]: https://www.kpn.com/service/eigen-apparatuur https://www.kpn.com/service/eigen-apparatuur