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A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

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Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#171

Post by Tanoc »

NicuCalcea wrote: post #162
bcraven wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a lazy criticism that I am _also_ growing tired of. If LLMs are trained on written information, that pattern of speech was present before they got there. It's a good way to add emphasis.

Certain patterns are much more common in LLM output than in human writing. I'm a journalist and love an em dash, for example, but I've never met/read another journalist that uses them nearly as often as LLMs. Same with the "this isn't just X, it's Y" pattern. When you have multiple of these patterns in every paragraph, it's a pretty clear indicator that the text is AI-generated. Plus, the author admitted to using AI…

One of the little tics I've noticed that helps weed out and LLM generated text is to CTRL+F and look for the word "therefor" in any of it. LLMs will use the word in a new sentence that isn't the conclusion of any previous sentences or paragraphs. Think like, "Bees are small fuzzy and yellow. Therefor their ability to fly is an astounding achievement." In all of my years of reading I've never seen people use the word that much in common writing, and when they do it's usually as part of a compound sentence. These things really do have their own little set of semantics and dialect that they follow that seems like it's a unique quirk.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#172

Post by hypercube33 »

stego-tech wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#173

Post by ksec »

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#174

Post by LeonM »

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...

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#175

Post by globie »

Twirrim wrote: post #59
mh- wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree it's certainly better than one can get from phoning support.

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.

We're talking about this line, right?

>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).

I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#176

Post by pwillia7 »

ksec wrote: post #173

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 y…

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?

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#177

Post by Thorrez »

mh- wrote: post #34
themafia wrote: post #27

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. Afte…

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?

You can put whatever name you want there when you post a comment. You don't need to have a registered account.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#178

Post by martinald »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #33
martinald wrote: post #16

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 s…

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…

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).

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#179

Post by LoganDark »

vedmed wrote: post #151
stingraycharles wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you want me to prostrate before you for using AI? Get real. I told you exactly how I used it. And no AI did not write the article. I wrote it. Then I instructed AI to restructure it to have a professional tone.

AI did write the article; you wrote the prompt to the AI.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#180

Post by teiferer »

vedmed wrote: post #164
teiferer wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for owning up. Though you did your original message a disservice. Now we are left wondering how forthcoming, honest and friendly you were with that support staff. I'd also try to cheap out if I'd have to deal with a rude and/or dishonest customer. I'm not saying you were, but it's hard for us to know if you throw things at us like "why should I care?" You need to understand that this causes certain reactions.

[flagged]

I personally don't mind at all that you used AI to make your writing more accessible. To the contrary, I think it's a very suitable use of the tool and I would do the same.

But don't you realize what impression you are conveying to the audience here by being so strongy defensive? To the point of lashing out at bystanders like me? That's exactly what makes people wonder how you interacted with the company that you are so strongly (and likely rightfully) criticising.

To answer your question, by "owning up" I meant admitting to using AI for the text after initially denying it. Again, no judgement on my end for having used it. Apologies if my choice of the term implies a judgement to you. That wasn't my intention.

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