Live data from Hacker News

A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

sacbear.com

231–240 of 361 posts

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#231
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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#232
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues. I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me. The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment. Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech. I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says the…

Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.

I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of the support chain."

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#234
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer. An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive compound) might not think it’s worth coming out and marking their fiber lines when you call the city’s 811 number to mark utilities before digging for a project, like a fence. If…

It’s AT&T not ATNT. You could have just said it outright, what is the point of the obscurity? It’s not funny if that’s what you were going for.

Yeah pretty unnecessary, who/what are you trying to protect here?

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#235
post #17

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 c…

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.

This can work. I have mixed results these days, usually down to issues of finding the right email addresses. I've been using SignalHire, but I need to use one with a deeper, more accurate database.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#236
post #17

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 c…

> if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support

Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith effort to resolve it with them beforehand.

What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they have no reason to bother actually even providing the service. Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money providing you with a service) to it being their problem (they now need to convince you to give them money).

Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden, and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of when you will need to do this again, not if).

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or send an actual letter in the post to the customer service department. I guess approximately nobody does this nowadays but it works very well for me.

Registered mail with proof of delivery works and is scary for them because it's a legally-admissible paper trail and proof of you trying to resolve the problem in good faith, which will complicate any of their attempts to collect money out of you down the line should you choose to stop paying (which you should also do if they don't address the issue in a reasonable timeframe).

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to the article (again), he was using his own Xfinity-approved modem. I doubt his neighbor was also using the same model. There's no point in performing random experiments if you've already ruled out those causes in some way. It would also require either renting a modem temporarily or buying one.

[deleted]

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#240

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…

Did the neighbor get in trouble or was this a mom-stealing-baby-food-and-diapers kind of witnessing?

Strongly doubt anyone fessed up to the destruction. "Came out this morning and some hooligans must have done it in the night"
Post reply on HN