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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

#261

Post by jliptzin »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #49
nativeit wrote: post #5

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.

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.

It's not more expensive, I am paying $40 / month for 100 Mbit, which is fine for me.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#262

Post by linsomniac »

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#263

Post by Frotag »

linsomniac wrote: post #262

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 neig…

Similar story, Cox silently tripled my speeds when a new company started rolling out fiber.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#264

Post by linsomniac »

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#265

Post by prirun »

Nextgrid wrote: post #236
tfvlrue wrote: 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 actu…

Stopping payment sounds good, but may not work for a couple of reasons:

1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.

2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.

3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#266

Post by neilv »

Nextgrid wrote: post #243
neilv wrote: post #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…

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 d…

How did you read that? This is an ongoing situation.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#267

Post by jallonclone »

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#268

Post by martinald »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #229
martinald wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ge…

When did I say that it was? I'm just saying it's hard to claim Comcast has a true monopoly anywhere now starlink exists. There's loads of issues with starlink, but it is a very viable alternative and is a big problem for incumbent US telcos as it caps what they can charge (there are a lot of telcos charging $100/month+ in rural areas for awful 2-8mbit/s DSL).

It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I suspect Elon will push the pricing down further and further.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#269

Post by ultrahax »

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.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#270

Post by jliptzin »

hylaride wrote: post #254
runjake wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What caveats? It sounds like Starlink would be a perfect backup and likely save you a lot of money.

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.

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.
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