18 ms·

A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

• bpbp-mango 11mo ago
  I'd start my own ISP for the area
  • cube00 11mo ago
    It's possible if you have the startup cash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906
• paulatreides 11mo ago
  > Xfinity is the only gigabit provider in this area. No competition. No alternatives. I can’t leave. So they don’t have to care. many such cases...
  • 1over137 11mo ago
    "only gigabit provider". Like those grow on trees. Lots of people would love to have a fraction of that speed.
    • fsckboy 11mo ago
      everybody has a fraction of that speed
      • bmacho 11mo ago
        Actually bandwidth if not 0 then is almost always irrational: rac number of bits / irrac time in seconds.
    • AngryData 11mo ago
      Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it. Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
      • PaulHoule 11mo ago
        It reminds of this book https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibilities-Change/dp/0465085881 https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi... which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and lower quality steel than international competitors who were using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern processes. In a market economy they would have been forced to go out of business or invest in new equipment —- that is, make a disinvestment that they didn’t want to make (that’s why they call it “capital(ism)”), it’s like the capital makes decisions on its own. Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long term, but what we did get was much more complex and path dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a great business that built out infrastructure which could be repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out good infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet.
        • gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
          Nice turn! >makes decisions on its own Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"? https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-democracy-socialism https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-... A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget. (Contexts: upcoming Donald-Zohran meeting, Venezuela. Etc): Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?) -Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive) -NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself ) Literary case study: The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist) Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism
    • ashirviskas 11mo ago
      Shut up, 1gbps up/down in 2025 should be a basic human right. I can't believe the things you learned to justify in US
      • koakuma-chan 11mo ago
        You are absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance towards ISPs that provide anything less than one gigabit per second.
        • aydyn 11mo ago
          This but unironically.
          • koakuma-chan 11mo ago
            I was serious.
    • yxhuvud 11mo ago
      Once an area has its shit in order regulatory-wise: yes. Here my house org will upgrade from 1- to 10-gbit next month, mostly cause it also bumps the wifi generation to the latest and the cost difference was neglible. Previous hardware was end of life , so we had to change stuff regardless.
• sidewndr46 11mo ago
  This has to be the weirdest post I've seen in a while? Cable infrastructure in the US is awful. I can't imagine a scenario where it would be reliable.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    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 :(
  • nativeit 11mo ago
    I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.
  • nativeit 11mo ago
    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.
    • sidewndr46 11mo ago
      The poor state of the infrastructure is usually a result of the monopoly. Maintenance is just a cost. It's not going to bring you any new customers or any new revenue. I've been through the same thing the post author has. By some random chance I once called tech support and got someone on the phone who was authorized to investigate it and do something about it. Service improved a little bit after that.
• nativeit 11mo ago
  I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
  • TimTheTinker 11mo ago
    Makes me wonder if Starlink is an option for OP. It's more expensive than most ISPs, but probably less than 3x what most people pay.
    • MobiusHorizons 11mo ago
      The op showed starlink as a comparison. It was one of several 100Mbit options. Comcast is the only service above the 100Mbit level at 1200Mbit advertised .
      • benjojo12 11mo ago
        100Mbit seems fine? I obviously don't have the full picture for what the OP is doing with their line on a day-to-day basis, but, saying that you're entirely out of options when there is an option that is just slower is a little odd (I do get that Starlink is also quite expensive if it is not your only serious choice)
        • Aachen 11mo ago
          Given that they have multi-minute outages multiple times per day and they're still not switching to one of the 100mbps options, I think it's a safe assumption that they really do need that speed more than the reliability I'm a heavy user myself and would be perfectly pleased with a symmetric 100/100 connection, but would even rather make due with 20/20 if that meant no regular outages, so I would agree with you but OP's needs seem specific
    • 11mo ago
• bigbuppo 11mo ago
  Call your public service commission. Call your municipality. The fun thing about cable companies is that unlike telcos, their monopolies are almost always bounded by a contract.
• j2kun 11mo ago
  The US gov't broke up AT&T and killed Bell Labs for this, so at least they owe us to bust this monopoly
  • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    I hate this meme that “government banning monopolies will solve everything”. It’s especially non sensical in this case or in the AT&T analogy. The baby bells still had a local monopoly in their region and cities only had one phone provider - the baby bell. The case is the same here. Even if you broke up the cable monopoly so they all became regional companies, you still won’t have a choice but for one cable/internet provider in that same location unless the local phone company decides to compete and lay fiber.
• altairprime 11mo ago
  If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.
  • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
    According to the article, it happens on a very specific set of intervals. That's not an RF issue. Downgrading/replacing the device isn't a solution.
    • altairprime 11mo ago
      There was an irregularly but often transmitting radio antenna tower fifty feet from my home, and the outage duration when an outage occurred was precisely the same each time, because Docsis is very carefully specified in how it starts up. (Don’t remember the duration, sorry.) The outage interval varied based on antenna usage; if OP is suffering a similar circuit break, a continuous transmitter nearby could certainly cause continuous outages at the regular interval “renegotiating, success, assigned channel collision” loop.
      • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
        The outages mostly happened at very specific times during the hour (:29 and :44) for 17 months. It just doesn't add up to being RF interference, especially from a radio tower. But if OP has a radio tower 50 feet from their home, I guess we could consider it. How did you know when the radio tower was transmitting?
        • altairprime 11mo ago
          The value here is “triage experiment: try an older modem”. If it reveals something, now they’re not stuck. If it fails in the same way, no knowledge is gained.
• bombcar 11mo ago
  I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally fixed it was to upgrade to business-class service, complain to business support, and they sent a tech who eventually found what it was (a tester on the line painted over so as to nearly be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to consumer DSL.
  • joecool1029 11mo ago
    My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier this year, end of contract came up. I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was showing up in advertising on the same road family business is on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site. Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete. Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location went from 300/20 to 300/300. Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared to buy my own modems. Thankfully it’s been pretty reliable, better than the power utility (especially since comcast will literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in extended outages).
• stego-tech 11mo ago
  I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter’s shitlist to this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to wait for the line to become available again. No amount of technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with their infrastructure. So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed. I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • jonhohle 11mo ago
    I recently had to do the same thing with Cox. It’s funny how a customer is responsible for repair fees until the FCC gets involved and all of a sudden they figure out the necessary work outside the house.
  • hypercube33 11mo ago
    One period they were "moving tv totally digitally" and as part of that my node basically ran out of bandwidth 3pm to 9am every day for two months. I lucked out because I was on business and knew my sales person and happened to live near their backup head office in the country but it took a tech driving over refusing to enter my house showing me this on his tablet and me driving to the office at 450pm super mad to finally get one of the engineers. They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing will be done until the move was completed.
• matt_heimer 11mo ago
  I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person. It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    Hey thanks I didn't realize I could do that. Updated the article with the docsis log. Bunch of UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing
    • ddtaylor 11mo ago
      What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
    • razingeden 11mo ago
      gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum recently. have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile? i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time .. and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate. TLDR: you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still. MORE: OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it). but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb. spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters ANECODTAL: my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds. techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment. TECHNICAL: i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter. its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through. sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>
• martinald 11mo ago
  Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights which would be on a timer and cause chaos). This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests. Also, why wouldn't starlink be an alternative?
  • vlovich123 11mo ago
    The author explains in the article they’re looking for gigabit service and Comcast is the only player in the area.
  • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
    I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs. Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times). So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for Xfinity. Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than his requirements, for one.
    • martinald 11mo ago
      Did he update the post since I commented? I'm sure they weren't there. I'm pretty convinced it is RF interference. (Nearly) all DOCSIS interference is at node level, it's a shared system so any RF is going to knock out neighbouring properties. He also could do with pasting the SNR and power levels for each DOCSIS channel :). Fair enough if the author really needs 1gig, but I think it's pushing to say it's a monopoly based on that. 99% of residential users would not really notice 300mbit starlink vs 1gig (and starlink is likely to reach gig speeds in the next year or so).
      • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
        Starlink is not a substitute for fixed broadband. It might be adequate for most use cases, but it's not equivalent and it never will be. Your "99%" figure is nonsense. More than 1% of people will see the difference in download speeds between 1Gbps and 300Mbps. You realize some apps and games show you information about latency and bandwidth? Also, just because they advertise "up to 305Mbps" doesn't mean everyone is getting that. A friend of mine with Starlink in the midwest gets about 100Mbps during off-hours. See <https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-us-performance-2025 https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-us-performance-2025> - median speeds are typically less than 150Mbps. Starlink also costs about 2x-4x as much per Mbps as 1Gbps service (at least where I am). I doubt they're going to suddenly offer 1Gbps speeds in the next year without changing their pricing. They'll add a new, more expensive plan. Even 1Gbps Starlink (which would be more than 3x the current max speeds) is going to have other differences such as increased latency (they mention 30-40ms in one place, 25-100ms in another), more jitter, and lost signal sometimes during bad weather. Starlink also uses CGNAT which eliminates a bunch of use cases and introduces its own problems with certain apps and games. They've had issues with capacity before where they wouldn't accept signups for some areas. Adding capacity involves launching more satellites. Starlink isn't the ultimate solution to everyone's Internet access problems.
• tfvlrue 11mo ago
  I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec. I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily. Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it. Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since. This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
  • joezydeco 11mo ago
    These days you get a lot better result from any company if you take a few minutes, find the email of a few VPs in the target company, and write the execs directly. Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
  > I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to care less. Maybe they were doing this? https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8 https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8
• joecool1029 11mo ago
  I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141’s that stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed ‘upgrade’ that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units same problem. I’m the problem using old modems says reddit. DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more sympathetic, but I still couldn’t get a tech that could do anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183 which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds. After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service. And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
• themafia 11mo ago
  The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer. They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
  • mh- 11mo ago
    I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3. Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
    • terminalshort 11mo ago
      Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
      • mh- 11mo ago
        I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree it's certainly better than one can get from phoning support.
        • szundi 11mo ago
          [dead]
        • Twirrim 11mo ago
          I can't speak to the accuracy of the diagnosis, but the claims about NTP are bizarre, and to the best of my knowledge, wrong. There's nothing specific about the times the incidents cluster around that would have anything to do with NTP. It doesn't work like that.
• billocks 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• devwastaken 11mo ago
  1. get a starlink. 2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems. your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting. 3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace. coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized. nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it. the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.
  • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
    1. Starlink is not an alternative for 1Gbps cable. It's slower with higher latency. It uses CGNAT which limits what you can do with it. 2. Can you provide a source for that? 3. According to the article, the neighbor has the same issue with the same timing. So it's not the modem or inside wiring.
• radlad 11mo ago
  I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I had a similar issue with WOW.
• gxs 11mo ago
  Not this bad of a situation but I’ve successfully gotten them to escalate to the network engineers who were able to help Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact with a network engineer would be helpful Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve your issue
• chmod775 11mo ago
  When you need a company like that to do something, figure out what they're afraid of. The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday, raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen: FCC, local politicians, etc. You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a single phone call.
  • mavamaarten 11mo ago
    That's the problem in my country. They're not afraid of anyone. It's a true duopoly here. There's no FCC to complain to, I guess the most you can do is weasel your way out of your contract but that leaves you with no internet. Local politicians don't give two shits (nor do they have any power). You could switch to a different provider, but their network is either copper (aka low speeds and unstable) or fiber (which is a hollow promise right now - there just isn't any fiber in my area).
  • paulnpace 11mo ago
    They fear juries (jurors, really).
• layla5alive 11mo ago
  I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building. But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case). I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices. I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times. My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
• netbioserror 11mo ago
  Couldn't cell or Starlink substitute in this day and age? 5G cells are pretty prolific now. So even if you might not want to actually leave, it's a perfectly good threat and functions as competition in their eyes.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    I tried to leave just a few days ago and use a Mint Mobile Wireless Internet. But then I found that I had to be double-natted and my reverse proxy didn't work so I would have to give up my servers and VPN.
  • HumanOstrich 11mo ago
    Nope. Usually much slower with higher latency, and CGNAT limits what you can do with your connection. Starlink uses CGNAT and some mobile carriers do as well.
• Hikikomori 11mo ago
  My cable internet was down for 3 weeks after a maintenance, they sent out someone 2 times. We had an irc channel where engineers from most of the countrys isps were in, but not this isp, but then i remember that there was a guy consulting for them. Took him 5 minutes to fix it, it was a problem with my speed profile (increased upload plan) and I was the only one in my area that was on it.
• hurricanepootis 11mo ago
  I got a problem with my AT&T Fiber service at the house. We pay for a 500 Mbps plan, and I can get 600 Mbps up and down via ethernet on speedtest (probably due to over provisioning). However, I can only download stuff about 8 MB/s from most places. I believe this to be an internal issue as whenever I connect to any VPN service, I can get the full 600 Mbps. Furthermore, some servers are able to serve me at full speed, but this is rare. Usually GitHub git servers can upload to me at full speed, while GitHub tar balls are uploaded to me at about 8 MB/s. Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?
  • ted_dunning 11mo ago
    If you can't document your attempts to document and resolve the issue in your FCC complaint it will have far less credibility.
    • hurricanepootis 11mo ago
      Ok, thank you! I'm gonna gather as much documentation as I can. Considering the fact that I get full speeds everywhere whenever I'm using a VPN, am I right to assume that there is an issue with AT&T's internal routing? And, that issue doesn't effect every path? I'm not really an expert at doing networking stuff, but I wanna gather as much empirical data to construct a report and do statistical tests n stuff.
      • ycombiredd 11mo ago
        My first guess wouldn't be routing, but traffic-shaping. Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN connection is subjected to.
      • toast0 11mo ago
        You can't see everything from your own connection, but you can see a lot. Take some pcaps of downloads that don't work. See if there's some common thing going on. Are you getting packets slowly with minimal loss or are there many missing packets? Does it seem like a path MTU issue [1]? Is the RTT reasonable? Traceroutes from your side aren't the most helpful, but see what's the same and different between download IPs that work well and those that don't. If we assume congestion is from the internet to you, traceroutes from the download servers that don't work would be most useful, but that's hard to get. Sometimes you can find a hosting provider with test download urls and a looking glass, which can be pretty helpful if that's what you're experiencing. Definitely look at ipv4 and ipv6. It's pretty common to get different routing between the same two endpoints on v4 and v6, so you get more debugging. If it is a routing problem, be sure you're testing same IPs for download between native and VPN, if you download by hostname and the DNS resolves differently, try both IPs both ways... maybe you're just getting poor selection from DNS which can be addressed in different wayss. If your native DNS always gives you cross country servers and your VPN is local and gets local servers, there you go. But if you do figure out the problem, you also need to find a way to escalate. Chances are phone support isn't going to be super helpful. Explore reddit to see if people get results there, find out what the replacement for dslreports is, etc. Edit to add: when you do reach out, you want to share a concise summary and easy to repeat test; not so much all the research you did behind it. But ... that test should include multiple sources for the download or support will say it's a single site issue and close the ticket. [1] I always blame PMTU, what does my test here show http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ If you don't get OK in all the boxes, that could be part of the problem... But that's usually slow start, not slow throughput after starting.
• efitz 11mo ago
  Large service providers hate you. Not just you; they hate all humans, especially those that they have to pay or those that cost them money. They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They literally don’t want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay them in a month. The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people who can do more than just read a script “did you unplug it and plug it back in?” Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don’t let things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the local government that you can vote out), and so “bad enough” is pretty bad compared to a place with real competition. It sucks, but there it is. Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they just don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.
  • alex1138 11mo ago
    I'm with you. They should all be prosecuted the hell out of
• djhedges 11mo ago
  Reminds me of the cable internet I had in college. Every night it would drop for several minutes at a time. My homework included cisco labs using equipment we had to reserve remotely so loosing my SSH connections was maddening. Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength. Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem went away, they said another tech would come back out and check on it. One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day to the dismay of the receptionist.
• DeathArrow 11mo ago
  Have you tried turning it off and on again?
  • DeathArrow 11mo ago
    Apparently the people downvoting haven't watched The IT Crowd TV series. It was a joke.
• yaur 11mo ago
  You need to get someone out there. Just tell them over and over again its an outside wiring problem and demand they dispatch a tech. the tech will have different phone numbers with people that sort of know what they are doing. At least this worked before chat gpt ate the world.
  • Jolter 11mo ago
    Sounds to me like they already had at least three on-site visits by technicians.
• rmoriz 11mo ago
  Germany/Vodafone: A couple of years ago my DOCSIS connection that worked flawlessly for years started to fail in almost the same pattern. All reporting and support communication went nowhere, had to use the procedure by German IT/Telco regulator to cancel my contract early. It sucked because VDSL is slower but Vodafone wasn’t interested in fixing. They claim something/someone in the curb is interfering but neither trace it down nor fix it.
  • 7bit 11mo ago
    Fuck Vodafone Germany in particular. I had a cable-contract that was rock solid for years until it wasn't. No amount of calls and complaints was able to convince them to do anything. First, it was clearly a problem in the house. Weeks later it suddenly was a regional issue that needed massive infrastructure updates. Then it became a problem caused by a single household creating massive interference, that they need to find. Months later they went back to infrastructure updates. After 9 months of this shit I reported the issue to Bundesnetzagentur. My next call to Vodafone and they "suddenly" offer to reduce my monthly subscription fee. After threatening to call the BNetzA again, they also offered to payback part of the fees of the previous 9 months. The problem was magically resolved 3 months later. I'm on the reduced monthly fee ever since. They have forgotten to raise it back to normal and I'm not reminding them about it because they have been such assholes about it.
    • rmoriz 11mo ago
      Cable TV is so bad to debug as it is not following a star topology in larger houses. What’s even worse: We have FTTB by the city carrier since 2009 but no efforts have been made to provide FTTH in-house. Recently they started an offer for retrofitting but as every flat is owned by a different party and nobody knows the difference in between FTTB+g.fast and FTTH, I gave up. Boomers and digital naives own our country.
      • 7bit 11mo ago
        I'm talking about cable Internet. But it probably doesn't change the content of your comment
• bob1029 11mo ago
  Infrastructure is difficult. I have to run 2 ISPs these days. FTTP and DOCSIS. The fiber line is obviously my primary and it's completely flawless when it's working. The problem is that about once or twice a year a utility contractor will break the fiber in my neighborhood and it can go out for up to 2 days. Cellular service is not sufficient to cover. The cable connection is what I use when the fiber goes down hard like that. I don't bother with a multi-WAN router or anything. It's a manual cutover thing. The cable can obviously go down too, but it follows a different path (power lines vs buried). The cable is more likely to go out, but it can be resolved more quickly assuming a localized incident. I was looking at using starlink for backup, but there are caveats with satellite connectivity in the woods.
  • runjake 11mo ago
    What caveats? It sounds like Starlink would be a perfect backup and likely save you a lot of money.
    • hylaride 11mo ago
      Satellite signals are low power and rely on line of sight. If he's properly in the woods, especially surrounded by hills, the trees could become a hinderance.
      • jliptzin 11mo ago
        My home is in the woods. Took me a while to switch to Starlink because it was difficult to get line of sight. Eventually, Xfinity pissed me off so much that I was willing to move heaven and earth to move to Starlink. I ended up running a 300 foot cat6 cable through a pond to the back of my property to the only place I'd get line of sight and it's been working great. If you have to pay someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish so it's above the tree line, it's well worth it.
      • runjake 11mo ago
        Yeah, I guess I'm just extrapolating my own experience deploying Starlink in austere environments and always managing to get somewhere with a 90 meter cable run of getting good reception -- even in the woods.
• ipkstef 11mo ago
  I had to step back for my own sanity when dealing with similar issues with xfinity, had multiple FCC cases open and they just lied their way through it with no impunity. OP if you're organizing let me know I have a burning fire passion for xfinity to get their just desserts
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    Do you have any ideas on how to leverage such organization to effectuate change? It would sure be great to have internet classified as a public utility.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • cyanydeez 11mo ago
      Start by never voting for deregulation
• jlubawy 11mo ago
  The periodic resets could also be watchdog timer related (without knowing what level their hardware is running on). Too long of a loop without resetting the timer (in a long loop), then the hardware also gets reset.
• bdavbdav 11mo ago
  In the UK we are lucky to have a bit better of the system - Openreach (or Virgin) own the cables, and ISPs pay Openreach to do the transit. IP based not dark fibre unfortunately. That said, most ISPs won’t escalate when there’s an OR problem, or at least take a long time to, and then the OR tech is usually just trained to test the cable coming in and not a lot else. I used to be with Andrew’s and Arnold (run by @revk who surfaces around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your behalf.
  • b800h 11mo ago
    I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.
    • fucalost 11mo ago
      It feels so odd (in a good way!) to see people talking about A&A - I recommend them to everyone I know, they’re truly excellent.
  • Aachen 11mo ago
    What's an or problem or tech? A web search gives predictably nothing
    • bdavbdav 11mo ago
      Openreach. The infrastructure provider
    • proactivesvcs 11mo ago
      In the context of UK infrastructure, "OR" is an abbreviation of "Openreach", part of the BT Group that is responsible for the infrastructure from ducts and poles to street cabinets and exchange buildings. It is not an organisation that an end user can access for support and is charged by ISPs to repair, upgrade and install additions to large parts the telecommunications network. It can be difficult to convince one's ISP to have Openreach investigate a physical fault or bottleneck, unless that ISP is the aforementioned Andrews and Arnold who literally implemented automated methods to repeatedly bounce faults back to Openreach when the latter insists on erroneously rejecting faults. Makes for entertaining reading :-)
• uoaei 11mo ago
  Name and shame!!! Charter, Cox, Comcast... all are ridiculously user-hostile.
• econ 11mo ago
  >Everyone downstream of whatever is broken on their infrastructure probably has it too. Probably?
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    Being careful not to make claims I can't prove.
• sp0ck 11mo ago
  You have an option. Starlink. If you are not FPS player you will be really happy. There are service interruption, but they are very rare (at least for me). Just drop single ping here and there.
• motbus3 11mo ago
  The always caressing hand of the free market and no regulations. I've been through this multiple times. A lawyer friend of mine told me that in such cases only going through a legal battle would solve the problem but the amount of money and time for the zero return will get no interest of any lawyers. You'll be out of luck unless yourself are a lawyer or you know someone being affected who is up to this tedious battle
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 11mo ago
    I am reminded of the troubles my parents experienced with their phone service when I was a kid. We lived out in the country, and every time it rained the lines would pick up horrific static. It was too much to have a voice conversation, let alone support the (slow) dial up Internet we used. A multitude of technicians came out and apologetically said there was a problem somewhere in a line, but they couldn’t get approval to really dig in because there just weren’t enough complaints - they theorized there was just one broken line somewhere in a bundle that water would seep in to, and we drew the short straw. Finally, one technician very quietly suggested that my parents go to the phonebook and call the state public utilities regulation commission. I still remember that their number was found on the one blue page in the telephone book. Within a few business days, there were half a dozen lineman out stringing new lines, and a supervisor apologizing to my parents, promising the issue would be fixed that day, and giving his direct line to them with the instructions to call if they ever had phone trouble again. My dad generally distrusts the government, but still marvels at that response to this day.
• immibis 11mo ago
  It's way easier than you'd think to start an ISP - at least if you're content to only provide internet to datacenter servers. That's a competitive market. You can buy switches and routers and servers, rent colo space, rent leased lines between DCs, pay for internet access from some upstreams and IXes and sell internet access to others in the same DCs. It's still difficult but it's possible, even for an individual. And you won't make any money on that because it's a competitive market. The real challenge is then getting that access out to all the surrounding individual homes and businesses. Laying fiber in streets or overhead can be legally difficult and it's also just a ton of physical labour. If any millionaires or mad scientists are reading this and frustrated with their own internet access, though, please give it a try. There are tons of success stories where someone just created a small ISP to free their small town from an internet monopoly that everyone hated.
  • Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Hosting and connectivity by itself is a really efficient cash incinerator - the only way out is to use it as a loss leader and then upsell the customers on other services, or sell them the connectivity as part of a greater package (you're no longer selling "connectivity" you're selling "we maintain and make sure your web service stays online and reachable").
    • immibis 11mo ago
      I'm estimating you'll make a profit once you figure out a way to plug thousands of individual homes into your loss-making backbone, and execute on it. However, the incumbent monopoly might lower prices and improve service quality to match yours. Which is almost mission accomplished, except for the losses you'll be making...
• hexo 11mo ago
  Sue them.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    I probably will but my monetary loss is so negligible they wont care. There's another article on that site about how I sued Subaru of America for covering up an octane issue.
• cyanydeez 11mo ago
  I spent years with DSL because xfinoty was the only option and when I tried to use them tgey tried to charge me to install a compatible modem that had zero requirements except flipping a switch. I walked into their store.
• ksec 11mo ago
  I am reading this and thinking why does it sound familiar. And then only learned Xfinity means Cable / DOCSIS. Edit: I wish the title could be edited as Cable ISP. It is a common problem with DOCSIS! And has been the case since 1.0 era. DO NOT use Cable if you can. It happens when it is over subscribed, as well as other radio interference. Although common cause is over subscription. You may actually try downgrading your speed / DOCSIS 2.0 / 3.0 to see if it helps. Funny enough with G.Fast, had they continue the investment running 1Gbps on telephone cable would have still been better than DOCSIS. I used to fight this before I got my fibre optic. Even 5G Internet is better than DOCSIS. For people who have never been through this, you will quickly learn the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off. I dont know about US, but in most places on earth Government seems to be ok to mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well. And it seems most property agency refuse to put internet connection speed and types on the property pages. If consumer could easily learn without optical fibre equals shitty property and refuse to buy or rent the land lord will have interest to quickly act upon it.
  • pwillia7 11mo ago
    interesting the article mentions his speeds dropped. I wonder if someone at support knows this but knows there's nothing they can really do to fix the issues?
  • neelc 11mo ago
    At the present moment I live in a place in NYC without fiber. Manhattan row townhomes are notoriously hard for Verizon to install FiOS in. I chose 5G over DOCSIS simply because of upload speeds. T-Mobile (both TMHI and Calyx Sprout SIM) has 40-75 Mbps uploads versus 20-35 on Spectrum. It also helps that I use a L2TP VPN to a BGP VPS to get myself a public IPv4, otherwise I'd have Spectrum for no CGNAT. Yes, I'd much rather have fiber with symmetrical speeds and low latency. Heck, if Spectrum had high split or even mid split I'd have that. Cable hyped their "10G" upgrades but it's basically vaporware while non-cable ISPs actually showed up with fiber and/or 5G. Trump's tariffs are also punishing cable ISPs.
• LeonM 11mo ago
  Story time! I've had a very similar problem with my cable internet circa 2010. It must have been DOCSIS 3.0. Multiple times a day my connection would stop working completely. The modem's 'connected' and 'carrier up' and 'carrier down' lights were on, and I had LAN communication with the modem, but no data would pass though on the WAN side. From the management page of the modem (I later learned you weren't supposed to know about) I could see the upstream and downstream carriers were correctly established and still operational, but on the IP (PPPoE) level the TX (upstream) packet counter was increasing, but the RX (downstream) packet counter did not. Releasing the IP on my router (remember, it was PPPoE), then waiting 10 minutes or so before renewing the IP via DHCP would bring connectivity back. I would call to my ISP (the largest ISP in my country) to try to resolve the issue. Every. Single. Time. I had to explain to the support employee that yes, I did disconnect and reconnect power, yes, my computer's software was up to date, yes, I did try connecting via LAN directly to the modem to eliminate any possible router issues, etc. Now, at this point in the story I should point out that I held a degree in electrical engineering, specialising in embedded systems and high-speed data transmission and also had just about all Cisco networking certifications. I was more than qualified to design cable modems myself, imagine the frustration wasn't able to fix this issue. One night I came home to the same problem, called customer service again, fully prepared to do the 'dance' of answering every basic troubleshooting question. But to my surprise, the guy on the phone seemed legit knowledgable. When I described him the symptoms I saw from the modem's management page he was rather surprised that I managed to discover that functionality, but said he knew what the problem would be then. The support employee was quickly to confirm that someone in my neighbourhood hard-coded his IP-address instead of allowing DHCP (a common trick back in the day to get a static IP on a residential cable connection), and that that IP was clashing with the IP their DHCP would assign to my router's MAC address. He asked me what brand of router I had, and had to explain to him that it was a self-built OpenBSD box. His response was: "great! then you probably know how to spoof the MAC on your WAN interface then?". I did, I changed my MAC to a value he gave me, and immediately my connection came back up. He explained me that any MAC address starting with AB:BA (named after the band) was reserved for a special block of customers with this kind of issue. We continued chatting a bit about DOCSIS, networking technology, modulation types, OpenBSD (it was also his favourite OS) and much more nerdy stuff. At some point I asked him, respectfully, how someone with his knowledge ended up at the support helpdesk of an ISP. He then told me he was the ISP's CTO, in charge of all network operations, and that he was just manning the helpdesk while his colleagues were on a diner break...
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  Another example why monopolies are bad.
• reactordev 11mo ago
  Bet you wished we passed net neutrality and made these monopolies common carriers now don’t you? The moment you saw the state of the junction should have told you everything you need to know and I would do everything to get out of Xfinity. Starlink is a great choice if you don’t have hosting requirements. I empathize because there’s regions in the US that have one 1 provider. You’re kinda screwed. Worst is Xfinity will do everything to blame it on you including charge you, the customer, for new cable lines and junction box. Rusted out splitters is also common.
• phkahler 11mo ago
  Starlink is available planet wide.
• joelthelion 11mo ago
  (not from the US) If xfinity sucks so much, could you try switching to a different provider?
  • manifoldgeo 11mo ago
    Xfinity has a massive market share and is often the only game in town or one of only two. The only alternatives are often smaller resellers of the exact same infrastructure under a different company name. Or, there's also satellite Internet, but it's an order of magnitude slower, has a low data cap, and costs at least as much as the others. Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared-mauch-didnt-have-good-broadband-so-he-built-his-own-fiber-isp/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...
  • Sunstruck 11mo ago
    They have an effective monopoly in a large portion of the country or they are still better than the handful of alternatives.
• kro 11mo ago
  A German ISP also has an IP6 issue and confirmed it over the phone but is not fixing it. It persists for years and can be observed on multiple households I checked. Most don't notice it, as refreshing the address or happyeyeballs works around it.
• supportengineer 11mo ago
  This post tells me that I could leave the Bay Area and move to Sacramento and buy a much better cheaper house and still be able to find smart technical people. I also recently dumped Xfinity cable modem service. It was reliable for 10 years and then all of a sudden it wasn’t.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    That's exactly what I did.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 11mo ago
  Comcast/Xfinity did a major upgrade of my neighborhood a few weeks ago, and now I'm getting similar-sounding intermittent outages multiple times a day... but that's not what infuriated me, and not what they will regret. As a technologist, I could understand there are a variety of possible causes, some not their fault, but then they had to go and be unambiguously jerky... My mistake was contacting support, about what seemed like a port-filtering problem after they temporarily backed out the upgrade. After I was forwarded to the wrong kind of CSR, so I cut that short, apparently (I learned later) the CSR slammed me into a more expensive plan, and also video streaming. After I realized I got slammed, and got into a support chat to undo that... I got what seemed to be a highly-skilled jerking-around, for literally an hour, where they kept trying a large set of dirty tricks, never just canceling the new things and giving me back the plan I'd had hours earlier. I finally told them that they needed to undo the slamming, and to email me confirming they're done that, since I would not be contacting Comcast again, and would instead call the AG's office and regulators. No email came, and then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill. I'm sure the dirty tricks call center person preserved their dirty tricks metrics for the day. And, further up the org chart, the rest of the machine continued to run in the default sketchy profit-maximizing (and, more to the point, individual-bonuses-and-promotions-maximizing) ways. So I think the first step is to leverage remaining good government, to make the company regret multiples of every dollar they've made by behaving this way to everyone, not only to me. Of course, making a company feel significant pain still won't directly end the problem, until either shareholders make CEOs and boards feel pain personally, or until more executives are criminally held responsible for knowingly leading criminal behavior of companies -- but making the balance sheet feel pain will be a start.
  • Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Edit: apologies, missed the "a few weeks ago" and didn't realize it was still an ongoing matter. Please disregard. --- Original comment: > then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill. And yet you let them do it, didn't recall the payment, and seemingly didn't even follow up on the threat? Looks like mission accomplished for them, of course the customer service monkey is going to do this again and everyone else will also happily look the other way while it's happening. Yes, corporation-on-consumer-fraud becoming de-facto legal is a major problem (that is unlikely to be something the current US government will address), but it mostly relies on fear/apathy and 90% of people caving in and paying (like you did); disputing the payment is easy and then the ball goes into their court and they must prove you agreed to this new contract/upgrade (which they can't) if they want to get paid.
• wdr1 11mo ago
  One nice thing about Starlink is it gives an alternative to what used to be monopoly ISPs.
• tlb 11mo ago
  Some bean counter at Xfiniti is reading this and moaning about how this one customer is using a disproportionate share of tech support time.
• anon7000 11mo ago
  This story is so relatable it hurts. The amount of my time ISP executives have wasted by their malicious decision to absolutely gut “technical” support… It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works. I’ve had issues like this with all 3 of my past 3 ISPs, which included Comcast, Astound (WaveG), and CenturyLink. The last two are even gigabit fiber… Astound had an issue where their upstream device wouldn’t let me get an IPv6 address (despite allegedly supporting it) and some packet sniffing revealed a specific issue that of course no support could help with. So any customer in this building will continue having that problem. Anyways, I ultimately canceled service after they had a 36 hour outage in the summer with no storms. And this was in downtown Seattle — the two closest buildings are a god damned datacenter and Amazon offices. CenturyLink was slightly better… but I noticed after signing up for the service that the fiber line going to their ONT had a bad kink in it which obviously breaks fiber. It took me like 5 chats and a couple phone calls to get them to send a technician, and even then, the technician said I was lucky they sent the only person who had and knew how to use the fiber splicer thing… That shouldn’t be fucking lucky! Every single person I talked to knew I needed my fiber line to be spliced because I told them exactly what the problem and fix was. Absolutely absurd. Executives should be punished for making customer service categorically awful, and yet they simply get promotions and bonuses for making it cheaper. I hope every exec who decided to make customer support useless could have these stories shoved down their throats for the rest of their lives.
  • craftkiller 11mo ago
    > It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works. Recently when Optimum in NYC broke their IPv6, only 1 out of the 5 tech support people I talked to knew what IPv6 is. None of them fixed the problem. The problem resolved after a couple of days, so I assume someone finally noticed their infrastructure was broken. Incredibly frustrating to deal with an impenetrable wall of incompetence.
    • PaulHoule 11mo ago
      My ISP (Frontier) struggles enough with the basics that the last thing I want to do is bring up IPv6.
• tibbydudeza 11mo ago
  I am in Africa - getting 100Mbps/100Mbps symmetric fiber to my home. This is frankly terrible for the biggest economy in the world.
• anonym29 11mo ago
  As someone who's lived in 10 different units/houses across 6 different US states, who values decent connectivity, Xfinity or Charter/Spectrum being the only gigabit-speed wired home internet service providers is an instant, non-negotiable deal-breaker for a prospective property for me these days. These companies continuing to offer service this unreliable and terrible is not unlike the GM fiasco of the FWD X platform in the 80s¹, where the company deliberately attempted to conceal faulty brakes that led to the deaths of over a hundred people while still selling the affected vehicles. The advertising these companies perform regarding this defective service amounts to fraud. The country would be a better place if Xfinity and Charter/Spectrum simply ceased existing such that sufficient demand for reliable modern fiber infrastructure became too powerful of a market force to ignore in regions previously dominated by these incompetent-bordering-on-negligent parasitic fraudsters. ¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_X_platform_(FWD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_X_platform_(FWD...
• jliptzin 11mo ago
  Yep, I knew this was Comcast/Xfinity just seeing the title. I had the exact same problem, for years. Intermittent disconnects for a few minutes at a time, multiple times a day. I must have had upwards of 50 technicians come to my house, all insisting there was some problem with the wiring in my house (there wasn’t) or the router or whatever (hardware all replaced multiple times including the wiring). Eventually after years of complaining that the issue isn’t in my house, they finally sent a bucket truck a half a mile up the road and the problem was fixed in about 30 minutes. It worked well for about a year and then started happening again. They started giving me the run around again. I had appointments scheduled for technicians to come, three times in a row they just never showed up. To “apologize” to me they said they would provide a credit on my account. The amount? 1 penny. I took a screenshot and saved it in case anyone thinks I am making this up. Luckily, by this time starlink was available in my area. I switched to that, turns out it’s much cheaper anyway and since then have not had any issues. The sooner Comcast goes out of business, the better. Tip to anyone reading this: After I cancelled and closed my account, they billed me one last time for double my monthly bill ($200). No idea why, probably they thought they'd try to get away with it. I had little to no interest in participating in their customer support circus again, so I just went online to my bank and submitted a dispute of the charge. The bank instantly ruled in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast chargebacks to do that. I also submitted a complaint to the AG office and my local commission but I'm not expecting anything to happen.
  • hinkley 11mo ago
    The cost of disgruntled customers is that they might work for a competitor or a company you have to work with, like a bank.
  • ebjcoat 11mo ago
    Of the ~40 or so businesses I do general IT work for in New England, the ones with Comcast as the ISP are the least reliable. They experience significantly more downtime than any other provider.
  • diogenes_atx 11mo ago
    I lived on the west coast for 15 years, mostly in California, and in my experience Comcast/Xfinity is one of the worst companies I have ever encountered as a consumer. Not only is the service unreliable, the company tries to slap you with charges when you call to report a problem. One day I saw a Comcast technician working outside my apartment, and as he was leaving, my internet service went down. I called Comcast, they sent someone out a few hours later, the internet was restored... and then, when I got my monthly bill, there was an additional charge for $29 or something, iirc. When I called customer service to ask them to remove the charge, they transferred my call several times and put me on hold for several minutes every time they transferred the call. Finally, after a hour on the phone, they agreed to remove the charge. Since then, I have moved to Austin, where there are two large Internet Service Providers competing against each other. I mostly use Spectrum; it is not perfect, people here complain about it, but it is incomparably better than Comcast.
• mattmaroon 11mo ago
  They’re not a monopoly anymore. Starlink is great, as is 5G to the home (I have both) where available. They’re already paying for it, they’ve built businesses around their monopolies. The ads you see on streaming networks telling you how bad 5G home internet is is their death rattle.
• linsomniac 11mo ago
  I found this one weird trick that'll get a Xfinity manager to personally come to your residence and leave a card with their cell phone number for you to call if you have any problems with your service. All it takes is for your city to start a build out of a fiber ISP. I really had no complaints about Xfinity service other than the limited outbound bandwidth. But when our city deployed their own fiber ISP and our neighborhood was one of the first to get deployed, I was anxious to switch. The week they pulled the fiber down our street, a manager at Xfinity came down our street super concerned with keeping our business. Prior to the city fiber we had no real other choice (4-6Mbps DSL or terrestrial wireless that was struggling). Having real alternative pushed the Xfinity price down by at least half, and made them start to care. The phone company has started deploying fiber in the last year or so as well.
  • Frotag 11mo ago
    Similar story, Cox silently tripled my speeds when a new company started rolling out fiber.
  • pixl97 11mo ago
    >All it takes is for your city to start a build out of a fiber ISP. So, I worked for Cox in the late 90s - early 2000s where in many Louisiana cities we had dial up return cable modems. Yea, these things sucked as bad as you would expect. The city pleaded with Cox to upgrade to a 2 way cable system offering incentives and low interest bonds, etc. Anything to get better internet. We wouldn't budge. So, the city started a municipal fiber push. In 24 hours the company released 2 million dollars in funds to.... no, not upgrade and work on infrastructure. For advertising against 'city socialism' and political donations.
• linsomniac 11mo ago
  I once had the joy of reversing the script on Xfinity tech support. I was online in the middle of the night and my cable connection went down. I switched over to cellular and noticed a bunch of other local people with cable modem IPs on an IRC channel frequented by my friends also disconnected at the same time. So I called Xfinity support to report the outage, the tech did some digging when I told him a bunch of local people seemed to be impacted, he found a report in their systems of an outage impacting my area. I asked him if he had tried rebooting their router.
• jallonclone 11mo ago
  I have a similar problem with the power company. Every day starting around 2200 (excluding Saturdays and US holidays), there are irregular voltage fluctuations in the 118-124 voltage range, which cause really annoying light flicker and might be damaging my appliances (3 water heaters, 2 microwaves, and an air conditioner all dead in the last 5 years), some of them new. It affects other neighbors and is clearly coming from the grid. Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article, they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about it.
  • hydrox24 11mo ago
    I wonder if what you're experiencing is something called "ripple control" (in Australia). Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power. Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.
• ultrahax 11mo ago
  Related, to this day my Frontier connection black holes all my traffic a couple of hops inside their network if I do sustained line-rate UDP (WireGuard, for example) for more then three or four minutes. After some LinkedIn sleuthing I got in touch with their local NOC director who tells me it’s some piece of gear that hangs so bad he can’t remote into it and it stays down until the watchdog fires. Been that way for two years now.
• qwertyuiop_ 11mo ago
  This is what happens when super conglomerate monopoly like "Comcast NBC Universal" essentially captured the federal anti-monopoly regulatory bodies as well as congressional seats in both parties.
• thallium205 11mo ago
  The author lists Starlink at 100mb/s down but I'm consistently getting around 400mb/s these days with the high performance dish and a commitment of gigabit speeds next year. He's got options.
  • vedmed 11mo ago
    Starlink would have be double natted and I couldn't run my server cluster nor my vpn. And it would have high latency.
• venturecruelty 11mo ago
  If only we had some organization working in the best interests of the common people, for the common good of all. It could enforce certain rules and standards, like making ISPs fix problems, and making sure everyone has access to high-speed internet. Does anything like that exist, I wonder?
• evilmonkey19 11mo ago
  Im from Spain and Im surprised. Do you still use copper? Here everything is fiber. Cheaper, stable, good and the cabinets are (most of the times) secured. Im not saying we are better because we have many issues (no ipv6 for instance) but It surprises me how few isp options you have in US. Doesnt the government force ISPs to being you good internet?
• bastard_op 11mo ago
  This is literally every/any ISP that maintains last-mile infrastructure or anything in between. Cable MSO's are (still it seems) the worst, and having worked for various of them in a network engineering capacity, including @home networks the pioneer of cable modems and service, I've seen it for 25+ years after now first or second hand from others that still do. Eventually it's cheaper to pay a call center agent to take their calls and abuse than fix the actual issue in the ground, which is simply business mantra for the 21st century for anything.
  • valiant55 11mo ago
    I have pretty good success with a regional provider. I have the option of a national (Verizon) provider, but since switching to fiber on the regional I've had a ~two disconnects, a few minutes of down time in two years. Fiber just seems more reliable.
• pjsg 11mo ago
  I had a problem with Comcast that was that native IPv6 traffic was slower than IPv6 over my Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel. Support was no use (no surprise). But I happened to meet someone who worked in Comcast's backbone network. He figured it out and I got 10ms knocked of my native IPv6 ping times. (See https://n1dq.blogspot.com/2015/03/ipv6-comparing-hurricane-electric.html?spref=tw https://n1dq.blogspot.com/2015/03/ipv6-comparing-hurricane-e... for the story). The moral of the story is to find someone who works at Comcast who has Engineer in their job title and reach out directly. Linkedin is your friend here.
• dramm 11mo ago
  Had very similar dropouts with Comcast. Fired them years ago. Can't be happier than with the 10G Sonic Fiber. Yes we are lucky.
• everdev 11mo ago
  Oh, this is the "innovation" our politicians and talk show hosts were talking about when they wanted regulation and government to get out of the way.
• everdev 11mo ago
  The sick part is they could afford to fix it 5 times over and still be insanely wealthy, but Comcast doesn't care about quality service, it's just a front company to funnel power and money to a small group of people. They're effectively a circle of hell now.
• dmitrygr 11mo ago
  Knew it would be comcast from the headline. I celebrate my liberation from comcast with a glass of champagne yearly on the date I was finally able to tell them to pound sand.
• PeterStuer 11mo ago
  Our cable DOCSIS isp in our neighbourhood was down for a whole week. Each day the calls and a tech visit on prem were assuring us "this is a top tier priority outage, we have crews on it 24/7", yet in the neighbourhood, not a technician in sight. Finally 7 days in a crew showed up in the street measuring each street cabinet. They were able to pinpoint the fault to a house 2 blocks down, where they told us a partial cable cut apparently had signal from their powerline flooding the coax signal. Once they decoupled that premise, signal in the area went back to normal. We were lucky in that we had a DOCSIS 3.1 that tries to downregulate modulations when cable noise is present, so instead of going to 0 internet for a week like the older DOCSIS installs, our usual 500/30 Mbps still managed 0.1 - 3 Mbps up, so things like mail could still eventually get through. Now looking into Starlink as a backup, as until they run fiber here, there is little alternative (besides vdsl, which is its own nightmare)
• porridgeraisin 11mo ago
  Nice thing in India is that all the major providers grey-legally put optical fiber everywhere, so you get FTTH or fiber to the street no matter what. In cities where the development authority is competent, it's slower as they actually have to get approvals and stuff. And in some places they use the 26Ghz band (technically part of 5G) for "air fiber" which is basically a wireless link from the roof of an apartment to a nearby line-of-sight base station. It gives good bandwidth as there is no interference with usual mobile data as that band never ended up working in practice without clean LOS.
• ovo101 11mo ago
  The real problem isn’t just one ISP refusing to fix upstream infrastructure—it’s the structural monopoly that lets them get away with it. When customers have no alternatives, neglect becomes a rational business decision: why spend money on upgrades if churn is impossible? This is exactly why municipal broadband and community ISPs matter. They don’t just compete on price, they compete on accountability. Until regulators or local governments break the monopoly, we’ll keep seeing stories where “upstream” issues linger for years because the provider has no incentive to care.
• chilimeatOG 11mo ago
  I have spectrum at my home. Same issue. Same response. And I’ve had it at three different locations with a few different hardware configs. Good lord they suck.
• chilimeatOG 11mo ago
  I have spectrum at my home and literally the same darn problem. Same response from them too. So lame.
• jlivingood 11mo ago
  For folks following this here - node and neighborhood look clean. The issue appears to be a failing cable modem (MB8611 - they seem to suffer frequent disconnects when they fail). We have suggested the customer replace the modem ASAP and we will re-run all the DOCSIS diagnostics. Suitable alternative COAM modems are listed at https://old.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/1kg99v3/buying_your_own_modem_read_this/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/1kg99v3/buying_you... - Jason (I work at Comcast)
• theLegionWithin 11mo ago
  Must be a California issue, never had any issues with Comcast except during the pandemic when everyone was working from home & their network couldn't keep up. In 15 years, that was my only complaint